THE AGILITY OF BUCKET BRIGADE PRODUCTION LINES

Abstract

Bucket brigade production lines can be con gured to be spontaneously self-balancing. This confers an agility that is inherent, guaranteed, quanti able, and stronger than conventional use of the term. We discuss the practical implications. In a \bucket brigade" production line there are fewer workers than stations. Workers carry product from station to subsequent station; then, when the last worker nishes an item, he returns to take over the item of his immediate predecessor, who returns to take over the work of his predecessor, and so on, until the rst worker on the line starts a new item. The idea is that, by abolishing xed work zones, workers can locally adjust how work is shared and so improve the instantaneous balance. However, we have discovered an even more powerful e ect: If the workers are sequenced from slowest to fastest, then global balance will spontaneously emerge and the line will achieve the maximum production rate [Bartholdi and Eisenstein, 1996; Bartholdi, Bunimovich, and Eisenstein, 1995; Bartholdi, Bunimovich, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0205 USA. E-mail: john.bartholdi@isye.gatech.edu Graduate School of Business, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637 USA. E-mail: don.eisenstein@gsb.uchicago.edu