Project R-16866

Improving working conditions and productivity in warehouses through human-centered system interventions (Research)

Warehouses are key in many companies’ supply chain, often impacting their success or failure. At the same time, the warehousing sector faces challenges such as rising customer expectations, booming e-commerce, and greater product variety. To cope with these challenges, warehouses still rely heavily on human workers, since technologies can only to some extent take over their tasks. However, warehouses struggle to attract and retain skilled workers, threatening their competitiveness. The Human Factors discipline places workers at the center of system design, leveraging their unique skills to align productivity with well-being. This postdoctoral project draws on this discipline by improving both warehouse workers’ physical and mental well-being. Specifically, it develops a task assignment model allowing workers to choose their next task, reducing the monotony inherent in warehousing work while safeguarding physical integrity through ergonomically optimal choice alternatives. Since granting such a choice is less straightforward in more automated settings, a novel model is developed to grant more mobility opportunities to workers in otherwise highly stationary roles, increasing their well-being while maintaining high productivity levels. The dual focus on psychosocial and physical well-being in both non-automated and automated settings marks a considerable advancement of the state of the art, benefiting both practitioners and academic modelling practices.

01 October 2026 - 30 September 2029