Evaluating the effects of workforce aging in human-based production systems: a state of the art

Despite improvements in technology, production flexibility, required by modern manufacturers to compete, cannot be increased without a large contribution of the major flexibility enabler: the human workforce. In many cases automation is still far from providing reliable solutions at reasonable costs and flexibility is mainly provided by human dexterity and cognition in manual and cognitive tasks. For many years the influence of human behavior on production system performance has been underestimated and a lot of unrealistic assumptions have been used to simplify the human component modeling. Notoriously, if on the one hand, due to their dexterity and learning skill, humans are recognized as the most flexible resource, on the other hand, they also are the most complex to be managed. Nowadays, population aging, first perceived as an issue of developed countries, is acknowledged as a global trend that will have drastic socio-economic implications over the next decades. From a business perspective, the age factor has to be taken into account at both strategic and operational levels. Constrained labor flexibility, loss of efficiency and knowledge transfer are core cross-disciplinary issues in the aging workforce management. In this article, focusing on manual repetitive tasks (i.e. assembly lines), a survey of the state-of-the-art in the management of the aging workforce has been conducted in order to highlight key aspects and suggest future research directions.