Minimising total cost for training and assigning multiskilled workers in seru production systems
研究了单元生产系统中多技能工人的培训与分配问题，目标是最小化培训成本和工时平衡成本，并提出了一个两阶段启发式算法来高效求解。
This paper investigates the multiskilled worker training and assignment (MWT&A) problem of the seru production system (SPS), which is a new type of assembly line configured as multiple assembly cells, or so-called serus. The configuration of the SPS emphasises production efficiency and flexibility, achieved by multiskilled workers (MWs) able to cope with the demand of high-variety and low-volume manufacturing. Well-arranged and trained MWs are viewed as a critical factor when it comes to enhancing the performance of SPSs. This paper studies the MWT&A problem in the SPS with the aim of minimising the total cost, specifically, the workers’ training cost and the balance cost of processing times of the MWs in serus. This study provides an applicable mathematical programming model and designs a two-phase heuristic, named the SAIG algorithm, to effectively and efficiently solve this problem. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by a comparison with the state-of-the-art heuristic through a series of computational experiments.