Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
In the wine industry, task planning is based on decision-making processes that are influenced
by technical and organizational constraints as well as regulatory limitations. A characteristic
constraint inherent to this sector concerns occupational risks, in which companies must reduce and
mitigate work-related accidents, resulting in lower operating costs and a gain in human, financial, and
material efficiency. This work proposes a task scheduling optimization model using a methodology
based on the ant colony optimization approach to mitigate the ergonomic risks identified in general
winery production processes by estimating the metabolic energy expenditure during the execution
of tasks. The results show that the tasks were reorganized according to their degree of ergonomic
risk, preserving an acceptable priority sequence of tasks with operational affinity and satisfactory
efficiency from the point of view of the operationalization of processes, while the potential ergonomic
risks are simultaneously minimized by the rotation and alternation of operative teams between those
tasks with higher and lower values of metabolic energy required. We also verified that tasks with
lower ergonomic-load requirements influence the reorganization of the task sequence by lowering
the overall value of metabolic energy, which is reflected in the reduction of the ergonomic load.
Description
Keywords
Ant colony optimization Risk assessment Optimization model Task planning Metabolic energy expenditure Winery
Pedagogical Context
Citation
: Freitas, A.A.; Lima, T.M.; Gaspar, P.D. Ergonomic Risk Minimization in the Portuguese Wine Industry: A Task Scheduling Optimization Method Based on the Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm. Processes 2022, 10, 1364. https:// doi.org/10.3390/pr10071364
Publisher
MDPI