Sustainable Personnel Planning in Highly Customized Assembly Lines with Work Sharing

在SuPerplan中，我们研究了有节奏的混合模式装配线(MAL)，其中高度定制的产品由操作员加工。我们将分析规划这些装配线上操作员工作的概念，建立适当的模型并开发新的算法，旨在提高这些装配线的经济和社会可持续性。我们认为，这可以通过由一组工人按照规划者指定的规则以交替或协作的方式执行某些任务来实现。这种组织形式被称为工作分担。我们确定了三种类型的工作分担，使公司能够丰富工作分配，降低人体工程学风险和工作完成时间的差异，从而帮助企业定制其产品范围和可承诺的生产。然而，工作共享增加了装配线规划的复杂性。过去，法学院的工作分担很少被调查，这导致了巨大的研究差距。此外，目前还缺乏对管理人员的适当方法支持。为了弥补这一差距，SuPerPlan在MAL的大量环境中调查了工作共享对计划的影响，例如人员规划、装配线设计或装配线平衡和调度。我们将提取优化问题，并开发适合的求解算法，将不同类型的工作分担的不同方面整合在一起。我们的主要挑战之一将是应对因考虑工作分担而增加的复杂性，因为当不考虑工作分担时，大多数优化问题在计算上已经很难处理。我们的规划程序将考虑社会可持续性的各个方面，如个人技能、公平分配劳动力和人体工程学风险。人们的注意力将集中在考虑装配线上的人员，而不是临时工。我们还打算以考虑到工人偏好的机制的形式设计参与性规划办法。这些规划算法必须是透明的，并对可能的自私操纵具有抑制作用。我们相信，该项目的结果将通过改善流水线上的工作条件和加强大量企业的产品定制，为社会带来积极的社会影响。

In SuPerPlan, we study paced mixed-model assembly lines (MALs) where highly customized products are processed by human operators. We will analyze concepts of planning the work of operators at such lines, build appropriate models and develop new algorithms, which aim at enhancing both economic and social sustainability of these assembly lines. We believe that this can be achieved by performing some tasks in an alternating or collaborative manner by groups of workers according to rules specified by the planners. This form of organization is referred to as work sharing. We identify three types of work sharing that enable companies to enrich work assignment, to reduce ergonomic risks and the variance of job completion times, and thus help enterprises to customize their product range and produce available to promise. However, work sharing adds additional complexity to the planning of assembly lines. Work sharing at MALs has barely been investigated in the past, resulting in a significant research gap. Moreover, an appropriate methodological support for managers is currently missing. To bridge this gap, SuPerPlan investigates the impact of work sharing on planning in a plentitude of settings in MALs, such as personnel planning, assembly line design, or assembly line balancing and scheduling. We will extract optimization problems and develop suitable solution algorithms that integrate different aspects of work sharing of different types. One of our major challenges will be coping with the increase of complexity due to taking work sharing into account, as most of the optimization problems are already computationally intractable when work sharing is not considered.Our planning procedures will take aspects of social sustainability into account, such as individual skills, equitable distribution of labor, and ergonomic risks. The attention will be centered on considering the assembly line stem personnel as opposed to temporary workers. We also intend to design participative planning approaches in the form of mechanisms that take into account preferences of workers. These planning algorithms must be transparent and have a disincentive effect to possible selfish manipulations.We believe that the results of this project will bring a positive social impact to the society by improving working conditions at assembly lines and enhancing product customization at a large number of enterprises.