Holonic-based Flexible Allocation of Workforce in Labour-intensive Manufacturing Shop floors

Assembly-based operations, in one-off and batch production, are mostly served by labour-intensive industries. The throughput performances of those industries are highly dependent on the performance of the labour on the job and the availability of the workers. The most significant threat to those industries is the sudden unavailability of skilled labour. Through a flexible workforce allocation system, such disturbances can be attenuated. This paper presents a workforce allocation system developed from the concepts of holonic manufacturing systems and PROSA reference architecture. The system is tested using a specifically developed C++ object-oriented software. Production data were gathered from the case study of a large computer manufacturing factory and used to simulate the proposed system. The paper then presents a comparison of the factory conventional method of workforce allocation and the proposed holonic workforce allocation system.