Dynamic Control of Non‐Collaborative Workers When Reassignment Is Costly

Cross‐training is an important tool to improve the performance of manufacturing and service systems through dynamic worker allocation. This study investigates how cross‐training can be leveraged when worker collaboration is not possible and frequent worker reassignment is undesirable. We consider a tandem queueing system with finite buffers between tasks. We show that if each worker is the fastest at a different task, then the optimal policy is...