Empirical study to explore the impact of ergonomics on workforce scheduling

Abstract

This work is focused on the workforce scheduling problem, investigating how the ergonomic exposure of a worker may affect the results of workforce allocation and the relative impact on production performances. A research methodology has been developed within a case study of an assembly flow with the twofold objective of (i) setting up a system able to consider the ergonomic parameters of workers within the solution of a workforce scheduling problem and (ii) finding the possible impacts that ergonomic postures can have on workforce allocation parameters. The ergonomic analysis, joint with the development of a constraint optimisation problem, resulted in a mathematical depiction of the ergonomic exposures and in a workforce ergonomic scheduling model. The study assessed how ergonomics may impact on workforce scheduling and the relative production capacity. Then, an experimental campaign joint with a tuning activity of the model resulted in a workforce scheduling configuration able to front the apparently contrasting objectives of production capacity optimisation and ergonomic stress lowering. The empirical results allowed also to quantify the trade-off between production performances, in terms of production capacity and idle time, versus ergonomic stress of the workers.

Keywords:

• workforce scheduling
• ergonomics
• postural analysis
• ergonomic exposure
• constraint optimisation problem

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Editor in Chief, Prof. Alexandre Dolgui, and to the five anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Matteo M. Savino http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7266-8849

Additional information

Funding

This paper has been developed in the framework of the research activities of the projects funded by the EU Commission for the Project Links in Europe and Asia for Education, Enterprise and Research – LEADER, agreement number EACEA IT 0861 001 001 within the Key Action 4 relative to Environment and Safety.