A Production Line that Balances Itself

John J. Bartholdi and Donald D. Eisenstein
Additional contact information
John J. Bartholdi: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia
Donald D. Eisenstein: University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Operations Research, 1996, vol. 44, issue 1, 21-34

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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.44.1.21 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:44:y:1996:i:1:p:21-34

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().