Citation

Darwish MA. Comput. Ind. Eng. 2023; 179: e109162.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.cie.2023.109162

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The relationship between workday duration, daily production rate, and worker fatigue accumulation and recovery has been overlooked in studies on Operations Research and Production Planning and analytical models that investigate this relationship are scarce. The purpose of this paper is twofold, the first of which is revising the widely adopted 8-hour workday standard and the second one is the determination of the economic daily production quantity when the worker fatigue accumulation and recovery are considered. A closely related issue to the proposed model is the current debate on the fitness of the four-day workweek. The model observes the interest of the employer by maximizing his overall profit while the worker is protected by imposing a constraint on his highest fatigue level. In order to solve the model, we derive an efficient algorithm based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker theorems. The numerical results show that neither the 8-hour workday standard nor the corresponding daily production quantity is optimal. More importantly, the results confirm the appropriateness of the four-day workweek system for work situations with low or moderate worker fatigue growth factors.

Language: en

Keywords

8-hour workday standard; Four-day workweek; Production; Productivity; Workday duration; Worker fatigue