Track: Undergraduate Student Paper Competition

Abstract

Base intuition tells us that if you don’t keep practicing a given skill set, it will continue to degrade the longer it goes unused. What does this mean for a skill set that only gets used infrequently? How can one be assured that when they need their skills, that they will be in a state that is reliable? This point becomes even more important when the skills set belongs to a technically skilled worker, within a maintenance facility. Not only does this affect the quality of the work produced, but also the time taken to perform the task. In this study, learning curve theory is applied to the workforce of a military maintenance facility to firstly, identify the changes to job task time that can be expected due to knowledge and skill degradation, and secondly, to determine training intervention types that address the loss of knowledge and/or skill. Through the use of computational experimentation based on Discrete Event Simulation maintenance model output, it was observed that without refresher training intervention, job completion times increased between 14% and 27%. With intervention applied, this increase in completion time can be reduced and maintained at levels as low as 4.14%.