A holonic shop floor workforce allocation system

Productivity in labour-intensive manufacturing shopfloors is highly influenced by availability and conditions of skilled workers. As operations intensify, the need for the right people at the right time performing the right job becomes increasingly important in order to respond rapidly to any disturbances caused by changing customer demands or other factors in the manufacturing environment. In this paper, a flexible workforce allocation model is proposed and presented in the context of holonic manufacturing system. The model is designed to respond to changes and disturbances in the availability of the workforce. Data from a real manufacturing shopfloor are used to test the model through a database system development and discrete-event simulation platform. The results show that the workforce allocation suggested by the holonic model in this paper is better able to respond to workforce change and disturbance than the company's conventional experience-based, decision-making process.

[1]  Luc Bongaerts,et al.  Integration of scheduling and control in holonic manufacturing systems , 1998 .

[2]  Luc Bongaerts,et al.  Reference architecture for holonic manufacturing systems: PROSA , 1998 .

[3]  Pär Mårtensson,et al.  Minimising the impact of changes and disturbances on manufacturingsystem performance , 2000 .

[4]  Henrique Luiz Corrêa,et al.  Framework to analyse flexibility and unplanned change in manufacturing systems , 1996 .

[5]  Barry Render,et al.  Production and operations management : strategic and tactical decisions , 1996 .

[6]  Rachid Zeffane,et al.  Planning for Human Resources in the 1990s: Development of an Operational Model (Планирование человеческих ресурсов в 90-х: развитие операциональной модели) , 1994 .

[7]  R. Lau.  Critical factors for achieving manufacturing flexibility , 1999 .

[8]  Paul M. Bobrowski,et al.  An evaluation of labor assignment rules when workers are not perfectly interchangeable , 1993 .

[9]  Hyunbo Cho,et al.  Enabling technologies of agile manufacturing and its related activities in Korea , 1996 .

[10]  Nancy Lea Hyer,et al.  Cellular manufacturing in the U.S. industry: a survey of users , 1989 .

[11]  John A. Mathews.  Organizational foundations of intelligent manufacturing systems — the holonic viewpoint , 1995 .

[12]  C. Handy.  The future of work: A guide to a changing society , 1984 .

[13]  P ? ? ? ? ? ? ? % ? ? ? ? , 1991 .

[14]  K. Maxwell.  EXECUTIVE STUDY ASSESSES CURRENT STATE OF ERP IN PAPER INDUSTRY , 1999 .

[15]  Hossein Sharifi,et al.  A methodology for achieving agility in manufacturing organisations : An introduction , 1999 .

[16]  Bill Fulkerson.  A response to dynamic change in the market place , 1997, Decis. Support Syst..

[17]  M. Mitchell Waldrop,et al.  Complexity : the emerging science and the edge of order and chaos , 1992 .

[18]  M. Saadat,et al.  Changes and disturbances in manufacturing systems: A comparison of emerging concepts , 2008, 2008 World Automation Congress.

[19]  B.M. Aucoin,et al.  Engineering Management , 1997, IEEE Potentials.