Bucket brigades revisited: Are they always effective? [An article from: European Journal of Operational Research]

This digital document is a journal article from European Journal of Operational Research, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Previous work on the dynamics of bucket brigades has focused on systems in which workers can be ordered with respect to their speeds and where this ordering does not change throughout the line. While this assumption is valid in most environments, it may not be satisfied in some. We consider such environments and explore the conditions under which bucket brigades continue to be effective (compared to a traditional static allocation) with respect to self-balancing behavior and throughput performance. A two worker bucket brigade is studied where one worker is faster than the other over some part of the production line and slower over another part of the line. We analyze the dynamics and throughput of the bucket brigade in two environments with passing and blocking. We present the dynamics of the system in each region of the parameter space and provide insights and operating principles for the implementation and management of the bucket brigades under various scenarios.