Abstract
In traditional production lines designed using the line-balancing method, each worker is usually assigned to a particular fixed work, and it is valuable to decrease the training task to master the assigned work. However, when an imbalance among workers' speeds exists, the slowest worker will delay the overall work in the production line, and the production rate of the production line will also decrease. To solve this problem, a "Self-Balancing Production Line" was introduced in which each worker is assigned to work dynamically, thus enabling balanced production to be retained. For this kind of line, convergence conditions, where the position of each worker converges to a fixed point and the production rate becomes the maximum, were derived under the same workload. However, in reality bottleneck in which a lot of works have to be processed exists, and few papers assume bottleneck. When considering bottleneck, conditions for maintaining balance that maximize production rate are changed. Therefore, it is important to analyze this effect. In this paper, self-balancing production line with bottleneck is formulated and analyzed for both cases that consider and ignore the walk-back time, and the conditions that enable balanced production are analyzed.
