Staffing and human resource assignment in U-shaped production cells

Abstract

Today, U-shaped production cells play an important role in manufacturing, as their flexibility allows for highly efficient production with a small number of operators. Since the cost of human resources has a significant impact on the total cost of the overall production process and the assignment of operators to tasks can have a major impact on the efficiency of the production process, it is important to develop design methods that allow the assignment of resources to tasks in a way that maximizes the efficiency of the U-cell manufacturing system. In this paper, the authors present a mathematical model for assigning operators to task sets using different objective functions. Calculations based on the presented mathematical model demonstrate that, given a suitable choice of objective functions, it is possible to determine an optimal operator-task assignment that can improve the efficiency of the manufacturing system.