Workforce influence on manufacturing machines schedules

Thisstudyaddressesaparallelmachinessch- eduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and additional resource constrains related to workforce management. In most industrial cases, the execution of jobs requires the involvement of human resources in ad- dition to machines: this work addresses the many com- 5 plications due to workforce specific issues that arise in a real industrial application. This is achieved separating the complex yet classical parallel machines scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times from the additional human resources planning problem: the for- 10 mer is formulated and solved through Constraint Pro- gramming, while an ad hoc procedure is provided for the latter. An Italian specialized firm, Prosino S.r.l., provides the industrial case to both validate the adequacy of the 15 adopted method to the actual industrial problem as well as to test the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Computational results obtained over six months of ex- perimentation at the partner firm are presented.