Abstract
Reduction of ergonomic risks is one of priorities at assembly lines. In this article, we claim that operational and tactical planning have a significant potential in mitigation of ergonomic risks. We illustrate this on the example of assembly line balancing. For this mid-term planning problem, we show that reduction of ergonomic risks is possible without increasing cycle times or introducing new workstations. We observed that by diversifying tasks assigned to individual workers according to the risks measurement function, we not only balance ergonomic risks among workers, but also achieve their reduction. With help of a two-stage heuristic, developed by us, we were able to find an assembly line balance with acceptable risks for each worker without increasing the number of stations for about 50 % of instances.
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Otto, A. (2014). Minimizing Risks for Health at Assembly Lines. In: Huisman, D., Louwerse, I., Wagelmans, A. (eds) Operations Research Proceedings 2013. Operations Research Proceedings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07001-8_46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07001-8_46
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