A Simulation Study of Dispatching Rules in Flow Shops with Dynamic Workers’ Learning Effects

• Main Authors: Shu-Pei Fu, 傅書珮
• Other Authors: Horng-Chyi Horng
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/01030798122514854521

碩士 === 朝陽科技大學 === 工業工程與管理系碩士班 === 96 === With the trend of lower birth rate and higher education background in recent years, the problem of worker shortage becomes more severe for industry. Training workers to learn more skills and becoming so-called multitasking workers is one major strategy adopted by many companies. Therefore, how to dynamically arrange workers to adequately execute production plan is an important issue for production management. A lot of research focused on the effectiveness of dispatching rules in flow shops, however, only a few considering the effects of learning and forgetting of workers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to evaluate dispatching rules under several performance measurements while taking into account the workers’ learning and forgetting effects. This study utilizes Systems Simulation and Design of Experiments to model the flow shop with dynamic workers as well as setup an appropriate experimental design to enable further statistical inferences. Factors considered in this study including worker assignment, dispatching rules, number of stations, system utilization, distribution types of processing time, and learning and forgetting effects. Simulation results are collected according to three performance criteria, i.e., mean flowtime, maximum flowtime, and work-in-process(WIP). The results show that the learning and forgetting effects of dynamic workers will indeed affect the choice of the best dispatching rule on different performance criteria. However, all in all, no matter what effects of learning and forgetting, SPT rule performs best on both mean flowtime and WIP criteria, while AT or AT-RPT rule has the best results on the maximum flowtime criterion. In addition, this study also performs a sensitivity analysis on the shortage of dynamic workers. The results show only slightly differences on the ranking list of dispatching rules when taking into account the workers’ learning and forgetting effects.