Designing Inclusive Workplaces: the HRC-ALWIRBP Model

Industry 5.0 is reshaping manufacturing systems by placing human well-being and societal impact at the core. Despite this shift, the integration of workers with disabilities (WwDs) into ordinary assembly lines remains limited, mainly due to concerns about productivity losses, contributing to underemployment and the need for more inclusive workplaces. Existing research has extended the Assembly Line Balancing Problem to account for workforce heterogeneity, including disability inclusion. However, WwD integration has mostly focused on the design of new lines, while their inclusion in operating lines requires system adaptation, leading to a rebalancing problem that has not yet been explicitly addressed. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a Constraint Programming model to support the inclusion of WwDs in existing assembly lines with collaborative robots. The model minimizes cycle time and the number of reassigned tasks. The latter is considered from two perspectives: the traditional task-station assignment and the impact on operators, since large changes in work routines may reduce acceptance of WwD inclusion. Task reassignment thus serves as a proxy for measuring disruption from a human-centered perspective. Worker-specific characteristics are explicitly modeled, including energetic profiles, rest requirements, task incompatibilities, and personal execution times, while collaborative robots are used as assistive technologies. Results highlight the trade-off between line efficiency and rebalancing disruption and underscore the importance of considering reassignment from both perspectives in the decision-making process when integrating WwDs into operating lines while maintaining productivity and fostering an inclusive work environment.