Optimization of human-aware logistics and manufacturing systems: A comprehensive review of modeling approaches and applications

Abstract

Historically, Operations Research (OR) discipline has mainly been focusing on economic concerns. Since the early 2000s, human considerations are gaining increasing attention, pushed by the growing societal concerns of sustainable development on the same terms as the economic and ecological ones. This paper is the first part of a work that aims at reviewing the efforts dedicated by the OR community to the integration of human factors into logistics and manufacturing systems. A focus is put on the modeling and solution approaches used to consider human characteristics, their practical relevance, and the complexity induced by their integration within optimization models. The material presented in this work has been retrieved through a semi-systematic search of the literature. Then, a comprehensive analysis of the retrieved corpus is carried out to map the related literature by class of problems encountered in logistics and manufacturing. These include warehousing, vehicle routing, scheduling, production planning, and workforce scheduling and management. We investigate the mathematical programming techniques used to integrate human factors into optimization models. Finally, a number of gaps in the literature are identified, and new suggestions on how to suitably integrate human factors in OR problems encountered in logistics and manufacturing systems are discussed.