Bucket brigades with worker learning

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 non-uniform 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. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.