A Production Line that Balances Itself
John J. Bartholdi, III, Donald D. Eisenstein
Operations Research · 1996 · Volume 44 · Issue 1
Abstract
In “bucket brigade” manufacturing, such as recently introduced to the apparel industry, a production line has n workers moving among m stations, where each worker independently follows a simple rule that determines what to do next. Our analysis suggests and experiments confirm that if the workers are sequenced from slowest to fastest then, independently of the stations at which they begin, a stable partition of work will spontaneously emerge. Furthermore, the production rate will converge to a value that, for typical production lines, is the maximum possible among all ways of organizing the workers and stations.
Keywords
industries, textile/apparel: multifunctional workers, mathematics, fixed points: convergence of nonlinear dynamical systems to a fixed point, production/scheduling, flexible manufacturing/line balancing: the allocation of work to each worker is self-balancing
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