Models for the Inclusion of Workers with Disabilities in Flow Shop Scheduling Problems

Persons with disabilities have severe problems participating in the job market and their unemployment rate is usually much higher than the average of the population. This motivates the research of new modes of production which allow the inclusion of these persons at a low overhead. In this paper we study the inclusion of persons with disabilities into flow shops with the objective of minimizing the makespan. Since flow shops usually have only a few machines, we focus on the inclusion of a single worker with disabilities into such a production line. We define the problem, propose several mathematical models for solving it, as well as realistic test instances. Computational tests show that the best model is able to optimally solve instances of moderate size. This allows us to study the potential benefits of this approach. In particular, we observe that the increase in makespan is lower than expected and does not depend on severe disabilities of the workers.