A study of labor assignment flexibility in cellular manufacturing systems

The objective of this research is to study labor flexibility in cellular manufacturing systems characterized by intra-cell operator's mobility. The special focus of the investigation is to explore the impact that using different labor allocation strategies have on system performance. This internal aspect of labor flexibility is referred to as labor assignment flexibility. Labor strategies are classified according to the type of machine-operator assignments including dedicated (when only one operator is responsible for a machine or group or machines), shared (when more than one operator is responsible for a machine or a group of machines) or combined assignments (when the operator has both dedicated and shared machine assignments). This work proposes a classification scheme and a framework that is composed by a set of propositions that evolved from an empirical study and includes the concepts of workload balancing, workload sharing, and the presence of bottleneck operations. The suitability of the framework is tested using simulation modeling in an actual cell implementation. The experimental results based on labor strategies using two and three operators show that the balance in the workload assigned to the individual operators and the level of shared workload are significant factors in determining the performance of the system.