Incorporating Uncertain Human Behavior in Production Scheduling for Enhanced Productivity in Industry 5.0 Context

Human-centered production systems are of increasing interest to researchers, especially with
the advent of the Industry 5.0 paradigm. Most research into production scheduling has long neglected
human workers’ specific roles and unpredictable behavior in a production system, treating
them as machines with deterministic behavior. This work studies the impact of human operational
behavior on the performance of a production system and proposes an optimization model
to allocate workers’ profiles to workstations. We modeled the punctuality profile as a Markov
chain representing a worker’s productive and non-productive states. We developed a simulation
process based on the multi-agent system (MAS) paradigm to test the effectiveness of the proposed
model and to measure the impact of workers’ behaviors and their assignments to different workstations
on the productivity of the workshop. A non-linear programming model is also proposed
to provide the optimal assignment of workers to workstations while maximizing the throughput
of a dual-resource-constrained flow-shop production system for a given mix of production. The
results obtained highlight the significant impact of human operator behavior on the performance
of a production system. The findings demonstrate the importance of incorporating human behavior
models into the decision-making process for assigning workers to workstations based on their
operational profiles.