Investigating work-related ill health effects in optimizing the performance of manufacturing systems

A. Sobhani, M.I.M. Wahab and W.P. Neumann

European Journal of Operational Research, 2015, vol. 241, issue 3, 708-718

Abstract: Working environment affects human health condition and performance. Human Factors (HF) scholars aim to elaborate this effect. However, HF studies mostly focus on employee occupational health and safety elements and their consequences on employee health conditions. They do not take into account Work-related Ill Health (WIH) risk factor effects at the system level. In contrast, operations research studies usually assume that operators involved in a system have identical performances and rarely consider WIH risk factor effects in optimizing system performance. This paper proposes a 2-state Markov chain model to quantify WIH risk factor effects and thereby estimate their economic impacts in optimizing a serial assembly line’s performance. Results of this research demonstrate between 0.52 percent and 8 percent increase for the total cost of the system as WIH risk levels change. This paper opens a new window to understand economic consequences of WIH effects, and to enhance systems performance by investigating working conditions.

Keywords: Operations research; Optimization; Serial assembly line; Workplace risk factors; Work-related health problems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221714007711
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:241:y:2015:i:3:p:708-718

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2014.09.032

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().