Advantages of assembly lines in Sheltered Work Centres for Disabled. A case study

Abstract Current practices for the treatment of the physically and/or mentally handicapped prescribe meaningful job activity as a means towards both a more fulfilling life and societal integration. In many countries, these practices have facilitated the development of many Sheltered Work Centres for Disabled. In the case study presented, a reengineering process is done starting from individual workplaces where only certain workers were capable of assembling the entire product, and finishing with an assembly line implementation. It is revealed how the traditional division of work in single tasks, typical in assembly lines, becomes a perfect tool for making certain worker disabilities invisible, providing new jobs for disabled people; always taking into account certain special constraints that are analysed.

[1]  Matthias Amen,et al.  An exact method for cost-oriented assembly line balancing , 2000 .

[2]  Roberta S. Russell,et al.  A Study of Labor Allocation Strategies in Cellular Manufacturing , 1991 .

[3]  Matthias Amen,et al.  Heuristic methods for cost-oriented assembly line balancing: a comparison on solution quality and computing time , 2001 .

[4]  G. Thomas Bellamy,et al.  Vocational Habilitation of Severely Retarded Adults: A Direct Service Technology , 1979 .

[5]  Stephen C. Graves,et al.  An Integer Programming Procedure for Assembly System Design Problems , 2011, Oper. Res..

[6]  W. Wilhelm,et al.  Assembly System Design: a Branch and Cut Approach , 1998 .

[7]  Nicole L. Amado,et al.  The Dynamics of Disability: Measuring and Monitoring Disability for Social Security Programs , 2002 .

[8]  Masayuki Matsui,et al.  A management design approach to assembly line systems , 2003 .

[9]  Hadi Gökçen,et al.  Assembly line balancing: Two resource constrained cases , 2005 .

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

[11]  Armin Scholl,et al.  A note on "An exact method for cost-oriented assembly line balancing" , 2005 .

[12]  Diane P. Bischak.  Performance of a manufacturing module with moving workers , 1996 .

[13]  Armin Scholl,et al.  Balancing and Sequencing of Assembly Lines , 1995 .

[14]  G. Vanderheiden.  Thirty-Something Million: Should They Be Exceptions? , 1990, Human factors.

[15]  H. Ford,et al.  My Life and Work , 1922 .

[16]  Ilker Baybars,et al.  A survey of exact algorithms for the simple assembly line balancing , 1986 .