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Workforce Agility in Repair and Maintenance Environments

Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208
iravani{at}iems.northwestern.edu
viji.krishnamurthy{at}philips.com

In this paper we consider workforce management in repair/maintenance environments in which repairmen are cross-trained to attend more than one type of machine. In this context, we study the machine-repairman problem with heterogeneous machines but with partially cross-trained repairmen. We introduce simple repairman-assignment rules as well as machine-priority rules that are effective in minimizing the machine downtime costs, or balancing the percentage of working machines of different types. We show that static machine priority rules are effective in minimizing systems downtime costs, while a generalized version of the longest queue policy is effective in balancing the percentage of working machines. We also introduce the concept of hidden symmetry in repair environments, and show that the well-known chain repairman skill set structure performs very well in repair environments with hidden symmetry. Finally, we provide insights into the design and control issues of repair/maintenance systems with cross-trained repairmen.

Key Words: machine-repairman problem; quasi-birth-and-death process; cross-training; preemption; myopic approach
History: Received: January 6, 2003; accepted: June 1, 2006.