A study of labor assignment rules with bottlenecks

Although labor flexibility has been recognised as an effective managerial tool to handle bottleneck problems, most of the past research in labor assignments rules has been done in an evenly loaded job shop. In this study, five new labor assignment rules, which incorporate bottleneck information, are developed and tested with the traditional rules in a bottleneck job shop. Four dispatching rules are used to determine the sequence of jobs at the work center. Three levels of mean labor transfer time were tested. One-way Analysis of Variance was used to examine the significance of the labor assignment rules for each dispatching rule and performance criteria. For the statistically significance variables, Tukey test was used to examine the relative performance of labor assignment rules. The results were different from the past research in an evenly loaded job shop in the labor assignment rules had a significant effect on the shop performance.