A hybrid simulation approach to dynamic multi-skilled workforce planning of production line

Workers cross-trained with multiple tasks can improve the workforce flexibility for the plant to handle variations in workload. Therefore, it is necessary to study the dynamic multi-skilled workforce planning problem of production line with the application of cross-training method. The conclusion is helpful to economize the cost of human resources when workload is low and enhance the productivity in the opposite case. This paper studies the dynamic multi-skilled workforce planning problem by exploring the effect of worker pool size and cross-training level on the performance of production line through simulation. A hybrid simulation model is built as the platform to study this problem with Discrete-event Simulation (DES) method and Agent-based Simulation (ABS) method. Besides, the effect of worker learning and forgetting is inevitably considered accompanied with the introduction of cross-training method and its impact on production line will be illustrated.