Bucket brigades with worker learning

Bucket brigades with worker learning

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Article ID: iaor20084343
Country: Netherlands
Volume: 176
Issue: 1
Start Page Number: 264
End Page Number: 274
Publication Date: Jan 2007
Journal: European Journal of Operational Research
Authors: , ,
Keywords: bucket brigade
Abstract:

The dynamics and throughput of a bucket brigade production system is studied when workers' speeds increase due to learning. It is shown that, if the rules of the bucket brigade system allow a re-ordering of its workers then the bucket brigade production system is very robust and will typically rebalance to a self-organizing optimal production arrangement. As workers learn only those parts of the production line that they work on, the stationary velocity distribution for the workers of a stable bucket brigade is nonuniform over the production line. Hence, depending on the initial placement of the workers, there are many different stationary velocity distributions. It is shown that all the stationary distributions lead to the same throughput.

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