Fixed task zone chaining: worker coordination and zone design for inexpensive cross-training in serial CONWIP lines

Workforce flexibility in operations management

“…A commonly used policy is Fixed before Share (FbS) that assigns workers to their fixed or primary tasks (on which they are most efficient) if any available; otherwise, assigns them to cross-trained or shared tasks (on which they have reduced efficiency) [69,72,76]. Some studies prioritize jobs and, accordingly, assign workers to jobs with the highest priority.…”

“…In contrast to pooling, each worker may have a unique subset of skills with proximity. Detailed studies of chaining strategies for cross-training were presented in [53,59,69,76,85,86,89,95]. The chaining strategy is found to be an effective, robust configuration of cross-training if, for example, cross-training is costly, systems are of high variability or uncertainty, and WIP is required to be low.…”

“…The general mechanism underlying these assignment methods is dynamically assigning cross-trained workers to places where they are not only capable of work but also the most in need. The most commonly used policies are to assign cross-trained workers to workstations with the longest queue (LQ), the heaviest workload, or the largest WIP (e.g., [69,76,95,97]). If workers are cross-trained to perform tasks on consecutive workstations, the maximum gap of queues, workloads, or WIP between two consecutive stations may also be the indication of where cross-trained workers may be most effective.…”

“…Aksin et al [57] reviewed the literature of cross-training for call center applications. Different from × × [58,59] × × × [60][61][62][63][64] × × [65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78] × × × [79][80][81] × × × × [82] × × × [83][84][85][86][87][88] × × [89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107] other review papers dedicated to cross-train...…”

The Work-Sharing in a Serial Production Line with Consideration of the Balance of Fixed Workload and the Accuracy of Information

“…A worker chooses to pass on a job with the shared task undone or completes the shared task according to specific rules depending on system information. This way of work-sharing is in somehow similar to fixed task zone chaining introduced by [3] but here the flow of job is unidirectional and no movement between stations. Reference [3] concluded that this design can nearly reach the performance of a fully cross-trained system.…”