Supporting Human-centered Work Design with Discrete Event Simulation: A Simulation Study of Skilled Worker Availability in Assembly Systems

Abstract

Qualified workers are becoming increasingly scarce in various industries in Europe. This also affects the labor-intensive assembly sector. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the availability of qualified workers during the selection and planning of assembly systems. This paper presents a procedure to assess the impact of the availability of workers with different qualifications in the simulation-based planning of assembly systems. An approach for representing the qualification of employees is selected and the implementation in the simulation is described. Additionally, a reference work plan is developed to compare different assembly organization forms. This plan is derived from analyzing work plans used in various companies and assembly forms. To represent typical scenarios related to the deployment of qualified workers, three simulation scenarios are analyzed for each assembly form. The evaluation of the simulation experiments takes into account the output and the workload of the workers as well as the task variety and the task identity in order to support prospective human-centered work design already in the planning phase. One key result is that group assembly shows greater flexibility potential than other forms of organization.

Authors 4

1. Maximilian Duisberg Aachen Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

2. Z.L. Song Aachen Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Verena Nitsch Aachen Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

4. Susanne Mütze‐Niewöhner Aachen Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany