Effects of Human Factors on Workforce Scheduling

In today’s competitive market, most companies develop manufacturing systems that can help in cost reduction and maximum quality. Human issues are an important part of manufacturing systems, yet most companies ignore their effects on production performance. This paper aims to developing an integrated workforce planning system that incorporates the human being. Therefore, a multi-objective mixed integer nonlinear programming model is developed to determine the amount of hiring, firing, training, overtime for each worker type. This paper considers a workforce planning model including human aspects such as skills, training, workers’ personalities, capacity, motivation, and learning rates. This model helps to minimize the hiring, firing, training and overtime costs, and maximize the workers’ performance. The results indicate that the workers’ differences should be considered in workforce scheduling to generate realistic plans with minimum costs. This paper also investigates the effects of human learning rates on the performance of the production systems. Keywords—Human Factors, Learning Curves, Workers’ Differences, Workforce Scheduling