Workforce management in manual assembly lines of large products: a case study

Abstract

Abstract:Assembly lines are used for a large variety of products in different industrial sectors. In this paper the focus is placed on complex assembly systems and workstations used for the final assembly of large and bulk products, such as trucks, aircrafts, buses, tool machines. An high number of tasks to be performed at a single assembly station, several workers involved in parallel in the assembly process and long Takt times make such systems different from the models intensively studied in the literature (e.g. the traditional Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem). This study firstly presents a new balancing model to address the problem of the total cost minimization when different operator skills are involved at the same time and then it applies the model to a real industrial case.

A new algorithm for resource-constrained project scheduling with breadth and depth of skills

“…Furthermore, multi-skilled workers make it easier to overcome absenteeism ( Inman, Jordan, & Blumenfeld, 2004 ) and reduce the amount of idle time ( Martignago, Battaïa, & Battini, 2017 ).…”

Consideration of workers’ differences in production systems modelling and design: State of the art and directions for future research

“…Moon, Logendran, and Lee (2009) developed a model for addressing the problems of selecting multi-functional workers with different salaries to match their skills and assigning tasks to a workstation when there are precedence restrictions among tasks. Martignago, Battaïa, and Battini (2017) presented a new balancing model for addressing the problem of total cost minimisation when different operator skills are involved at the same time (i.e. the work aim is cost minimisation by applying single-skill workers and trained, multi-skill workers).…”

“…The classification in Table 3 shows that there are compelling evidences that workforce differences can largely impact the task processing time (Sotskov et al 2015) and consequently the cycle time (Moussavi, Mahdjoub, and Grunder 2017) and cost, including the total cost (Martignago, Battaïa, and Battini 2017) and training cost (McDonald et al 2009), and the throughput (Bentefouet and Nembhard 2013). Many of the selected papers acknowledge that time and cost are largely influenced by the differences between workers, particularly in terms of skill.…”

“…Ramezanian and Ezzatpanah 2015), cost (i.e. Martignago, Battaïa, and Battini 2017), throughput (i.e. Buzacott 2002) and human health and job safety (i.e.…”

“…Idle time Osawa and Ida (2007); Wong, Mok, and Leung (2006) 2 Cost Dalle Mura and Dini (2019a); Hashemoghli, Mahdavi, and Tajdin (2019); Samouei and Ashayeri (2019); Hochdörffer, Hedler, and Lanza (2018); Martignago, Battaïa, and Battini (2017); Rabbani, Akbari, and Dolatkhah (2017);Fattahi, Samoei, and Zandieh (2016); Ramezanian and Ezzatpanah (2015); Denkena, Charlin, and Merwart (2013); Othman, Bhuiyan, and Gouw (2012a); Othman, Gouw, and Bhuiyan (2012b); McDonald et al (2009); Moon, Logendran, and Lee (2009); Doerr, Klastorin, and Magazine (2000) 13…”