Ergonomic assessment of repetitive work time as a key parameter for job rotation schedules

Repetitive work, awkward postures, and load handling, along with their associated efforts, constitute one of the main causes of occupational diseases in the agricultural industry. The purpose was to design a job rotation schedule that considers the ergonomic risk and production demands that are proper for the rose harvesting tasks. The ergonomic risk was assessed through the OCRA index, which was used as a task assignment parameter. Through a case study carried out in the Colombian flower industry, respective OCRA index values for the right (3.3) and left (2.5) upper limbs in the rose harvest activities were observed. In this case, a network-structure-based task programming model was introduced as the basis for the solution. The objective function (OF) yielded a feasible solution value Z = 20.1. This indicates a decreased effort resulting from the task allocation flow, which preserves the productivity of the tasks of the harvest area of the six companies under study.