Worker Performance Modeling in Manufacturing Systems Simulation: Proposal for an Agent-Based Approach

Discrete event simulation is generally recognized as a valuable aid to the strategic and tactical decision making that is required in the evaluation stage of the manufacturing systems design and redesign processes. It is common practice to represent workers within these simulation models as simple resources, often using deterministic performance values derived from time studies. This form of representing the factory worker ignores the potentially large effect that human performance variation can have on system performance and it particularly affects the predictive capability of simulation models with a high proportion of manual tasks. The intentions of the chapter are twofold: firstly, to raise awareness of the importance of considering human performance variation in such simulation models and secondly, to present some conceptual ideas for developing a worker agent for representing worker performance in manufacturing systems simulation models.