Additional effort estimation due to ergonomic conditions in order picking systems

Daria Battini, Martina Calzavara, Alessandro Persona and Fabio Sgarbossa

International Journal of Production Research, 2017, vol. 55, issue 10, 2764-2774

Abstract: Within a warehouse, the picking activity often relies on human operators. Therefore, when designing and evaluating a manual picking system, it is important to consider that, besides the high flexibility the pickers are able to warrant, they inevitably require an additional effort due to their ergonomic working conditions. In this paper, the authors propose a new model to consider such additional effort, starting from the concepts of human availability and rest allowance. The new method allows the evaluation of the current configuration of a certain warehouse, considering two different operative situations (directly employed operators and indirectly employed ones). Moreover, it makes it possible to estimate and to understand the benefits that can be achieved by introducing some ergonomic improvements. The proposed procedure has also been applied to a real industrial case study.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00207543.2016.1190879 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:tprsxx:v:55:y:2017:i:10:p:2764-2774

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TPRS20

DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2016.1190879

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Research is currently edited by Professor A. Dolgui

More articles in International Journal of Production Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().