Workforce influence on manufacturing machines schedules

Abstract

This study addresses a parallel machines scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and additional resource constraints related to workforce management. In most industrial cases, the execution of jobs requires the involvement of human resources in addition to machines: this work addresses the many complications due to workforce-specific issues that arise in a real industrial application. This is achieved separating the complex yet classical parallel machines scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times from the additional human resources planning problem: the former is formulated and solved through constraint programming, while an ad hoc procedure is provided for the latter. An Italian specialized firm, Prosino S.r.l., provides the industrial case to both validate the adequacy of the adopted method to the actual industrial problem and test the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Computational results obtained over six months of experimentation at the partner firm are presented.