Modeling job rotation in manufacturing systems: The study of employee's boredom and skill variations

This paper presents a methodology for job rotation in manufacturing systems that aims to ease employee's boredom and exploit the effect of rotation intervals on worker's skill learning and forgetting. To this end, a series of formulations are proposed to measure employee's boredom and skill variations during a production horizon. Based on the proposed formulations, a mathematical programming model for job rotation is developed, and a numerical example is provided to illustrate its applications. Furthermore, based on a generic framework of the SAMED metaheuristic, a search algorithm, SAMED-JR, is tailored to solve the proposed model for large scale problems. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.