Evaluation of Layout Designs Taking into Account Workers’ Fatigue

It is known that the workers’ fatigue can greatly affect both industrial performances and the workers’ well-being at work. Consequently, when designing a manufacturing system, managers are interested in facility layouts that favor performance objectives, while avoiding excessive fatigue. Unfortunately, most existing studies related to layout design focus on technical aspects of the considered system (e.g. flow costs, distance between machines, etc.) so that human factors, in particular fatigue, are insufficiently taken into consideration. Therefore, we are interested in how the workers’ fatigue can be taken into account when evaluating possible layout designs. We analyze the factors that induce fatigue, which are mainly concerned with the work arduousness, and depend on the layout. We explain how they can be considered in order to compare possible solutions of a layout problem. In such a context, emphasis is put on the role of simulation. We illustrate our purpose and highlight the importance of taking fatigue into consideration through a comparison, using simulation, of two different layouts of a job-shop system. The comparison is based both on the mean flowtime of jobs and how the workers’ fatigue evolves over time.