Sustainable Personnel Planning in Highly Customized Assembly Lines with Work Sharing

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Dominik Kreß; Professorin Dr. Alena Otto
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 414225725

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants