In the last years many object-oriented simulators have been proposed, both by scientific community and the commercial software retailers, as powerful manufacturing process simulation tools because of their easiness to be configured: in fact, they do not need complex mathematical model formulations and allow unlikely simplifications in the process activities definition to be avoided. Very often, software simulating the human factor effect in a manufacturing process concerns the task times evaluation and effective design of manual workplaces or the analysis of ergonomics. On the other hand, in the available manufacturing process simulation software, the absence of properly designed objects reproducing the human resource attributes is frequent and the influence of human factor on the process performances at the moment of the shop floor control activities was rarely simulated. The aim of this paper consists of filling this gap by introducing within a commercial object-oriented simulation environment the human resource as an object characterized by several attributes, which also include the level of worker ability in the completion of an assigned task. To test the developed simulation environment, a multi model assembly line has been developed and a statistical analysis has been performed on different scenarios, characterized by different combinations of machines, workers, parts to be produced and assigned tasks.
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