An approach to assessing the individual competence level in the manufacturing sector

Nowadays, the human factor is considered as the key element of flexibility and performance of manufacturing systems. Resources in production system are basically machines and operators. Most of the scheduling work consists in assigning tasks to a set of resources by defining their order and their starting execution dates and finishing dates. The objective is to find an optimal schedule satisfying one or more objectives. Human resources are generally taken into account after the allocation of tasks to machines to establish a schedule. Classical models assume that the human resources are identical and therefore it is possible to assign a task to anyone of them. These methods are inefficient to solve problems considering human resources with diverse skills and different constraints. This paper examines research studies dealing with the human factor in production scheduling and introduces an approach of the individual competence level assessment.