Heuristic approaches for scheduling manufacturing tasks while taking into account accumulated human fatigue

Human factors are often ignored in scheduling algorithms despite the fact that the majority of manufacturing systems still employ human operators. In particular, ergonomic studies shown that human fatigue has an important impact on worker performance and as a consequence it should be taken into account in the modelling of the system performance. This study investigates the problem of the integration of accumulated human fatigue into scheduling algorithms. A new optimization problem is defined and several constructive heuristics are developed to solve it. Their performances are evaluated through a numerical experiment. The conclusions of this analysis and future research directions are discussed.