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Aircraft maintenance technician (AMT) is the most critical profession in the aircraft maintenance system. The tasks of a licensed AMT require expertise and involve repetitive physical tasks such as tightening or loosening aircraft parts, carrying or removing parts during long working hours under time pressure and day/night shifts. This study aims to attract attention to the difficult working conditions of AMTs and identify the body parts that are at risk of musculoskeletal disorder (MSD).

A questionnaire is developed by the authors to gather demographic information, use of hand tools, equipment, use of fall protection, manual material handling (lifting, pushing, pulling), load weight, environmental factors, and MSD discomfort level perceptions. The questionnaire is applied to 150 AMTs during six months period, and the obtained data are analyzed by sequential ordinal logistic regression (OLR) models.

The ORL results confirm that the use of equipment (lift platform, scissors lift), safety belt attached to the platform, manual material handling, environmental factors (humidity, vibration and illumination) and resting periods have a significant effect on MSD risks. On the contrary, age, experience level, use of small hand tools, temperature and noise are not identified as statistically significant.

The study is original for it considers the working conditions and perceived discomfort levels of AMTs. A questionnaire is introduced to assess the consequences of the use of tools, equipment, fall protection equipment, environmental conditions and work organization on various body parts (neck, shoulder, elbow, back, lower back, wrist-hand, hip, knee, and ankle-feet), and strain level is identified. The study contributes to the theoretical aircraft maintenance literature and managers in practice.

A layout problem may deal with the assignment and arrangement of buildings in a green field, location and/or relocation of machines/departments in manufacturing facilities, and so on. If multi‐periods are considered, the problem is called a dynamic layout problem in manufacturing environments. Designing web pages, especially internet newspaper layouts, might also be considered dynamic layout problems. This study aims to introduce a layout procedure for the front page of internet newspapers.

The news contents are ranked and selected based on their characteristic attributes. Then they are assigned to locations on dynamic content area of the front page. Layout optimization is made by use of Clonal Selection Algorithm (CSA). Finally, an illustrative example is provided and concepts for real life applications are discussed. The proposed method is based on CSA, which is a nature‐inspired technique. The novel heuristic is applied to a simulated system to depict how the news content layouts can be optimized in dynamic environments.

The capacity for addition of new news contents and removal of the old turns the internet newspaper environment into a dynamic structure. A systematic layout method for internet newspapers is developed to fill the gap.

The results are encouraging for real life applications of internet newspapers. The study has also introduced a new site for the manufacturing area. In the classic dynamic layout model, the machine locations and the number of available machines are assumed to be fixed. But the concept of introducing/removing news contents can be adapted to the machines at the manufacturing facilities.

The paper's value lies in showing that the front page layout is not considered to optimize the locations of the articles. Also, the proposed algorithm is applied to solve these kinds of problems.