2022 Volume 73 Issue 2E Pages 104-123
Cellular Bucket Brigades (CBBs) can absorb the impact of velocity variability on throughput, which makes them perform better than traditional Bucket Brigades under random worker velocities. However, the throughput of CBBs may decrease because of blocking and/or halting at discrete workstations. Among the various solutions, collaboration has emerged as an interesting candidate because it can substantially reduce the impact of blocking and halting. To improve the throughput of the existing collaborative model, two types of collaboration models are proposed from different perspectives. One of the problems addressed is that the existing collaborative model performs unsatisfactorily to achieve higher throughput in some cases due to its design, and another is that it has complex worker operation principles and many unproductive movements. A comparison of the proposed and existing models shows that the proposed models achieve outstanding improvements in throughput figures.
