A new methodological framework to schedule job assignments by considering human factors and workers' individual needs

One of the biggest management challenges for companies consists in including workers’ features during production process decisions to obtain more realistic planning and scheduling outcomes. The increasing percentage of ageing operators in manufacturing areas, due to the postponement of retirement age, contributes to enhance the level of both physical and cognitive disparity among workers. Moreover, workers could present physical limitations that restrict the execution of certain tasks. Strong seasonality and the current spread of e-commerce lead companies to face sudden high peaks of market demand through constant operators’ turnover. Consequently, workers are not equally skilled and work-related injuries can arise whether tasks are not performed correctly by an ergonomic viewpoint. In such a context, Industry 4.0 tools and real-time monitoring systems have gained higher attention since they can be adopted for training purpose and also such as data collector for every single worker in order to propose ad hoc job rotation solutions. In this paper, we propose a new methodological framework that integrates anthropometric and ergonomics measures during the scheduling decision process and defines all steps needed to define a worker-oriented and flexible scheduling of assembly tasks or job assignment. Each task is categorized in the framework according to three drivers: physical stress, ergonomic risk and execution time. According to the variability of each of them among workers, we propose a step-by-step procedure that can help practitioners to select the most suitable worker in executing each task aiming to reach flexible scheduling by an inclusive workforce.