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The recent SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has challenged companies, from both service and industry sectors, to reorganize how their business are operated in order to guarantee continuity to their operations while maintaining proper and safe conditions for workers and customers as well. In fact, a recognized preventive measure against the coronavirus spread, that has been adopted by many governments all over world, is to limit as much as possible and to make safer social interactions in the workplace. The effect of such measures is very impactful on those activities that require physical presence or a direct interaction with physical resources such as shop floors. For example, on an assembly line, it could be more difficult for operators to maintain appropriate distances if the new workplace and the new working conditions have been attentively conceived and deployed. This paper has the objective of showing how computer simulation can support companies in this complex task and, at the same time, of providing an operational tool and a case study application. Particularly, it uses a computer simulation tool (i.e., AnyLogic), to model and evaluate alternative design solutions with the aim of making the considered shop floor more resilient from the coronavirus spread perspective. We focused on the automotive sector and considered the case of a two-sided single model assembly line and the related surrounding areas. Various reconfigurations of the assembly line were considered with the aim of reducing contagion likelihood during production. In order to increase the distance between operators, we compared different solutions involving centralized and decentralized warehouses as well as collaborative robots (i.e., cobots). Each configuration was also tested with respect to the individual protection parameter, i.e., we explicitly considered the type of protection the operators use while performing their activities (no mask, surgical or FFP2 mask). |
