Short Term Manpower Management in Manufacturing Systems: New Requirements and DSS Prototyping

Abstract

The short term planning and scheduling of manufacturing systems has been mostly focussed in the past on the management of machines, implicitly considered as the critical resources of the workshops. Some of the present schedulers claim to also manage human resource, but this management consists most of the time in a "myopic" allocation of an operator to a machine. However, it is clear for workshop managers that operators are not resources like the others, and that their specificity should be better taken into account by short term planning facilities. Thanks to a questionnaire answered by nineteen French companies of different sizes and industrial sectors, we have tried to identify more precisely the industrial requirements concerning the short term management of the human resource.