Including workers with disabilities in flow shop scheduling

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 to include 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 one and two workers. We define the problem, propose mathematical models and a heuristic solution, as well as realistic test instances. In computational tests we evaluate the performance of the models and the heuristic, and assess the utility of such a model of inclusion. We conclude that the problem can be solved satisfactorily, and that including workers with disabilities into flow shops is economically feasible.