Impact of ageing workforces on long-term efficiency of manufacturing systems

Many industrial nations are faced with the question of the effects of the demographic development, particularly with respect to the employment of an ageing workforce. An increase in the share of older employees is to be expected, while the share of younger employees and therefore the number of skilled workers decreases. Their employment will not only be mandatory but will also increase in numbers in order to maintain the share of skilled workers, their know-how, and their experience. However, this development is opposed by the deterioration of physical abilities, which needs to be compensated by technical aids and organisational measures. The associated effects on occupation and productivity may be estimated as to quality but cannot be quantified on an operational level to date. However, special approaches for the modelling of personnel-oriented simulations are available in order to answer these questions for individual production systems with respect to the quantitative assessment. Using the simulator ESPE-AS, which is geared towards age-appropriate structuring of processes and tasks, performance developments of a given workshop and workforce can be forecasted for future time spans. This article describes this procedure and shows with the help of a pilot study how the development of the productivity of an ageing workforce can be forecasted for a period of several years.