A simulation based approach for enhancing health aspects in production systems by integrating work margins

摘要

Over the past thirty years, workplaces and especially production systems have been through numerous changes due to globalization. By Introducing new outstanding sociotechnical system design like lean manufacturing, todays workshops are more reactive to the market. In spite of the improvement in terms of reactivity and efficiency, the harmful impact on the workers’ health is noticed. Work related disorders among them the Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSD) became more frequent among assembly line workers. Several approaches aiming to reduce the MSDs and operator risks in general have been proposed. Conventional approaches which focus on biomechanical risks have showed their limitations. A new approach based on “work margins” has been proposed to overcome the shortcomings of the conventional ones, by taking into consideration psychosocial risk factors. This paper aims to propose an approach for integrating work margins in production systems using Discrete Event Simulation (DES).