Metaheuristic approach to multi-objective ergonomic workforce scheduling for Bi-hazard industrial tasks

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the daily scheduling of workers who are simultaneously exposed to two ergonomic hazards when performing their assigned tasks. Safe daily rotating work schedules are generated to minimize the maximum exposure amounts of both hazards simultaneously. A non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) method is employed to generate near-optimal workforce scheduling solutions. A numerical example shows that for a small multi-objective problem, the NSGA-II is able to yield the same set of non-dominated Pareto points as those obtained from a multi-objective optimization model with ε-constraint method. A computational experiment further demonstrates that the NSGA-II can yield acceptable non-dominated Pareto points in reasonable computation times irrespective of the problem size.

KEYWORDS:

• Workforce scheduling problem
• ergonomic hazard reduction
• multi-objective optimization
• non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).