Workers’ availability definition through the energy expenditure evaluation

This paper aims to evaluate worker’s availability for tasks and general activities that require a high level of physical effort, in order to study human availability in the industrial context. According to many studies, when physical effort for a specific working time is higher than a threshold value, workers are subjected to fatigue and so recovery time is mandatory to avoid injuries or accidents. However, the threshold value is influenced by workers’ characteristics like age, body mass, height, gender or level of aerobic exercises and for this reason, recovery time can assume several values according to workers’ features. Moreover, the workers’ availability cannot be the same for workers with different characteristics. For this reason, this paper proposes a new approach to define workers’ availability considering the worker’s age and the working time as two main features. Results are very interesting as they could help managers and practitioners to assign activities to workers according to their characteristics in order to maximize their productivity, reducing injuries and idle time at the same time.