Assembly manpower allocation under proportionality constraints

Allocation of manpower to the production of assemblies and subassemblies can be treated by models like linear programming. In general, final assemblies, subassemblies and components can be inventoried in order to get optimal manpower allocations. But there are situations in which the allocation to assembly operations may become more complex. Such a situation arises in the production of some electronic assemblies, where the quantity of each subassembly produced will have to bear a fixed proportion to the quantity of the final assembly because the subassemblies are not permitted to be inventoried for various reasons. This problem particularly arises in manpower systems with skills which are oriented to the products (assemblies) rather than to the operations, which is generally the case with engineering production systems. It appears from the literature that such a situation has not been dealt with so far. The fixed proportion is depicted as a set of proportionality constraints in the formulation of the problem as a linear program. A solution of a case is presented in detail.