Competence Based Worker Assignment and Impacts on Production Scheduling in Precast Construction

Current precast production planning methodologies have limited applicability in practice owing to the neglect of human factors and the separate consideration of scheduling and worker assignment. This study systematically defines the employee competence involving the individual experience in each type of operation, learning rate, professional skills and operation specifications, to evaluate the impact of workers on the processing time of each operation. Further, a competence-based worker assignment model (CIWA_PP) is proposed to optimize the worker allocation from the short-term (time-oriented) and long-term (competence-oriented) views. Finally, the superior of the proposed model is validated by a real case study. The results indicate that the CIWA_PP model can achieve 58.3% and 56.2% time savings in these two scenarios respectively, compared with the traditional methods ignoring the impact of human factors in existing studies. The developed model fills the research gaps on the impact of human factors on production and enhances the long-term human resource development.