Designing Cyclic Job Rotations to Reduce the Exposure to Ergonomics Risk Factors.

Jose Antonio Diego-Mas

doi:10.3390/ijerph17031073

Abstract

Job rotation is an administrative solution to prevent work-related musculoskeletal disorders that has become widespread. However, job rotation schedules development is a complex problem. This is due to the multi-factorial character of the disorders and to the productive and organizational constraints of the real working environments. To avoid these problems, this work presents an evolutionary algorithm to generate rotation schedules in which a set of workers rotate cyclically over a small number of jobs while reducing the potential for injury. The algorithm is able to generate rotation schedules that optimize multiple ergonomics criteria by clustering the tasks into rotation groups, selecting the workers for each group, and determining the sequence of rotation of the workers to minimize the effects of fatigue. The algorithm reduces prolonged exposure to risks related to musculoskeletal injuries and simplifies the assignment of workers to different tasks in each rotation. The presented procedure can be an effective tool for the design of job-rotation schedules that prevent work-related musculoskeletal disorders while simplifying scheduled changeovers at each rotation and facilitating job monitoring.

Highlights

Work organization is defined as the way in which work is structured, managed, and processed [1].Job rotation belongs to a group of work organizational strategies that seek to reduce workers’ exposure to ergonomic hazards by introducing variation in the tasks performed by the workers
This paper presents RGA, an evolutionary algorithm [38] to generate job rotation schedules aimed to prevent work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMDs), that simultaneously solves important organizational problems found when rotation schedules are implemented in real environments
To achieve the benefits expected from job rotation, it would be convenient that the movements required in the tasks developed in the workstations in the same rotation group were different

Summary

Introduction

Work organization is defined as the way in which work is structured, managed, and processed [1].Job rotation belongs to a group of work organizational strategies that seek to reduce workers’ exposure to ergonomic hazards by introducing variation in the tasks performed by the workers. From the workers point of view, job rotation has a positive influence as it reduces monotony [2] and boredom [3], reduces the level of stress, increases employee satisfaction [4,5] and extends the range of skills [6,7,8], retains skills for a cross-trained workforce [9], and enables workers to observe and correct deviations at an earlier production stage, which improves product quality. It facilitates the integration of disabled workers [10], reduces fatigue and physical stress and, as a result, the incidence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMDs) [7,11,12]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion