Tuesday, May 20

8:30 AM-9:30 AM
Chair: Kurt Wiesenfeld, Georgia Institute of Technology
Ballroom I, II, III - Level B

IP6
Bucket Brigade Production Lines

Bucket brigade manufacturing is a way of organizing workers on a production line, in which there are fewer workers than stations and each worker carries his work from station to station. The order on a line is fixed, We address the problem of the optimal sequencing of workers on a line so that the production rate of such line would be maximal. The performance of such production lines can be effectively described by the dynamical system defined on a simplex. The application of ideas of dynamical systems theory resulted in increased production rate of such lines in the apparel industry. The randomized version of this model proved to be efficient for coordinating pickers in the warehouses that resulted in the essential increase of pick rates. The speaker will explain why this happened.

Leonid A. Bunimovich
Southeast Applied Analysis Center and School of Mathematics
Georgia Institute of Technology

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MMD, 1/31/97 TJF, 4/15/97