Special workers' assignment optimization under the limited-cycled model with multiple periods

Abstract

Although assembly line is widely used for several decades since it appears during the Industrial Revolution, nowadays, it still has the vitality, especially in the developing countries such as China, where labor-intensive enterprise is still the mainstay industry. Assembly line has its advantages for reducing costs and production time. However, laborer is the main factor of production speed in such a labor-intensive enterprise. Because of the various working capacity of worker, one work process may delay or idle, and this will influence processes. This unforeseeable consecutive delay of process may lead to the postponing of whole manufacturing production. In order to minimize the risk, the assignment of the workers, especially untrained worker is focused on. In previous researches, rules of optimal worker assignment with two kinds of workers, which are distinguished by the capacity of processing, were proposed when minor untrained workers are less than four people. In this paper, we deal with the rules under this LCMwMP (limited-cycled model with multiple periods) model without concerning the number of minor untrained workers. Additionally, some rules of minor well-trained workers assignment optimization are researched by numerical analyses.