Data-Driven Reallocation of Workers in Engineering-to-Order Assembly Islands: A Case Study

Abstract

In this paper, it has been shown that the data-driven reallocation of workers in a turbine valve assembly island is necessary because the occurrence of unexpected events delays the desired completion time defined in the schedule. The main characteristics of the problem are as follows: 1) the turbine valve is placed on a fixed site, and the workers and the required equipment are moved to the assembly site; 2) the sequence of assembly tasks is fixed, which reduces the number of significant disruptions to the upstream operations; and 3) the processing time of each task is dependent of the skill level and the number of the assigned workers. This paper proposes data-driven reallocation of workers in engineering-to-order assembly islands to meet the specified due dates and use human resources efficiently. The goal is to minimize the labor cost by reallocating the workers in order to meet the due dates when an unexpected event occurs. The problem was modeled as an integer program and optimally solved by means of the LINGO (Linear Interactive and General Optimizer) 11.0 optimizer. The experimental results showed that the solutions obtained were improvements to the solutions implemented by the foreman.

Keywords

• Assembly island
• data-driven
• integer programming
• worker allocation
• engineering-to-order