Cellular Bucket Brigades
نویسنده
چکیده
Workers in a bucket brigade production system perform unproductive travel when they walk to get more work from their colleagues. We introduce a new design of bucket brigades to reduce unproductive travel. Under the new design, each worker works on one side of an aisle when he proceeds in one direction and works on the other side when he proceeds in the reverse direction. We propose simple rules for workers to share work under the new design and find a sufficient condition for the system to self-balance. Numerical examples suggest that the improvement in throughput by the new design can be as large as 30%. Even with a 20% reduction in labor, the new design can still increase throughput by 7%.
منابع مشابه
Chaos and Convergence on Bucket Brigade Assembly Lines
One way to coördinate the efforts of workers along an assembly line that has fewer workers than work stations is to form a bucket brigade. Each worker in a bucket brigade simultaneously assembles a single item (an instance of the product) along the line. The worker carries the item from work station to work station until either he hands off his item to a downstream co-worker or he completes the...
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