| This research focuses on the issue of workforce flexibility in a serial production line, assuming that workers are heterogeneous in task learning-forgetting behaviors. The primary objective of this research is to improve productivity of a manufacturing system through appropriate decisions regarding multi-skilled labor allocation. The benefits of labor flexibility is examined in conjunction with a set of shop floor decisions and design issues, such as station tenure, worker rotation rate, buffer capacity, task complexity, and task similarity. Heuristic approaches for workgroup composition, worker assignment, and scheduling are developed in order to improve system productivity. A series of optimization and simulation experiments is employed to examine the performance of the proposed heuristics relative to present industry practice. This work contributes to the field of workforce management, with the results demonstrating that considering worker heterogeneity in the processes of selecting, assigning, and scheduling workers significantly improve productivity. |
