Abstract

The literature about labor intensive production planning addresses certain problems such as workforce sizing problems, workforce transfer problems and multi skill-level workforce utilization problems. Some of them considered quality related issues or workforce learning effects in modeling and solving these problems. In this thesis, a production planning model is developed for small to medium sized labor intensive production systems. It aims at deciding the optimal production plans for producing different types of products and assigning workers of different skill levels to production stations in the considered system. The main production planning model is formulated with the considerations of learning effect, quality issues, overtime work hours, and possible delays in product delivery. Numerical example problems based on practical cases are presented to illustrate the considered problems and the behavior of the developed model in solving these problems. The strength of the proposed model lies in the integration of some critical issues in a production system. A main advantage of using the approach developed in this thesis is to provide shop managers different options in deciding the number of production lines, overtime work time, on time or late product delivery, when the demand is seasonal and volatile.