Synergy, Collaboration and Self-Balancing in Production Systems - The Bucket Brigades

Abstract

The line balancing problem, which is NP-hard, concerns any industrial flow line activity. The “bucket brigades” represent a production line example of intrinsic balancing, realized by the functioning protocol itself. The global optimality results from a decentralized control strategy, based upon the collaboration and the synergy of many individual (human) “agents”. The theoretical analysis of the bucket brigades has started with the “Normative Model”. This paper intends a brief survey of the analysis approaches based upon the extensions of this model and the generalizations of the bucket brigades principle.