Empirical study to explore the impact of ergonomics on workforce scheduling

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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.