An approach to Quantum Annealing-based workforce assignment in manufacturing systems

Workforce assignment (WA) is a crucial aspect of production planning and control. However, current global crises have led to workforce absence and skill shortages. To tackle these challenges, a short-term WA approach is necessary for manufacturing systems flexibility and workforce health. Conventional methods for WA face complexity issues due to complex manufacturing systems, requiring substantial computation time. A Quantum Annealing-based WA approach is proposed in this paper to allocate tasks and shifts to workers. The proposed method is validated in a use case, showing improved solution quality compared to traditional methods.