Work planning in low-volume assembly lines under ergonomic constraints

In order to implement the human-centric manufacturing and sustainability concepts in industry, an important effort should be done in order to model working conditions for human operators and improve them. Several studies have been conducted for mass production assembly lines where short cycle times make the work content highly repetitive. However, the case of low-volume production with long cycle times and different impacts on human operators has been rarely considered in the literature. In this paper, we develop a model to take into account the associated ergonomic risks in assembly lines with long cycle times. An optimization method is also developed in order to schedule tasks and assign the required tasks to a set of human operators taking into account the existing ergonomic risks. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.