Optimal Operator Assignment and Cell Loading in Labor-Intensive Manufacturing Systems with Inter-Cell Operator Sharing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24425/mper.2025.157216Abstract
This research deals with an operator assignment and cell loading problem in multi-cell production systems with inter-cell operator sharing. A two-phase methodology is proposed to minimize the total manpower requirement. In the first phase, manpower configurations for all products with all levels of manpower available will be generated taking inter-cell operator sharing into consideration. The second phase optimizes the cell loading and selects the manpower configuration for all cells when given a product mix. In order to further reduce manpower requirements, lot-splitting is considered. For both phases, the corresponding mathematical models, which can be optimized by commercial software, LINGO 17, are developed. A case study of a jewelry manufacturing company proposed taken from the literature is adopted to test the proposed methodology. The results show the strategy of inter-cell operator sharing can save 11.56% manpower at most. Moreover, if lot-splitting is considered, at most 14.66% of manpower can be saved.References
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