Dynamic Load Balancing with Flexible Workers

We study the problem of dynamically allocating flexible workers to stations in tandem or serial manufacturing systems. Workers are trained to do a subset of consecutive tasks. We show that the optimal policy is often LBFS (last buffer first-served) or FBFS (first buffer first-served). These results generalize earlier results on the optimality of the pickand-run, expedite, and bucket brigade-type policies. We also show that, for exponential processing times and general manufacturing networks, the optimal policy will tend to have several workers assigned to the same station.