A survey of the self-balancing production lines (?bucket brigades?)

The purpose of this paper is to present the main idea and rules of the "bucket brigades" and to analyse the modelling approaches and some real case studies reported in the literature. The "bucket brigades" represent a new concept of organising the flow line activities. This principle, first time implemented at Toyota, requires a considerably reduced design and supervision effort as regards the traditional assembly lines. The simple functioning protocol yields the spontaneous line balancing, due to a decentralised control strategy. So, for instance, it is no longer need to solve the Assembly Line Balancing (ALB) problem, which is NP-hard. In this paper, the main theoretical results are summed up, emphasizing the advantages and disadvantages of implementing the bucket brigades and identifying the still open problems. It seems that the bucket brigades have some strong points versus the classical solutions, including, but not limited to: decentralisation, flexibility, adaptability. This study will allow to generally concluding on some new trends in the production systems design and management. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]