A Study on the 'Bowl Phenomenon' in Production Line Balancing

라인벨런싱에 있어서 'Bowl현상'에 대한 연구

'Bowl Phenomenon' refers to allocating the work loads to middle stages slightly less than the outer ones in a series production system. Millier and Boling(1966) first discovered that the output rate of a production line were obtained by deliberately unbalancing, like a bowl-shape, under certain circumstances. So far quite a many researches have been studied either theory-oriented or simulation-oriented on this topic. However the papers concerning assemble production line are rather rare possibly due to the system complexity. In this paper, a simulation work on a 6-node assembly line has been conducted with the help of SLAMSYSTEM software. The simulation results have been turned out that 1) the Bowl phenemenon is still valid in the given system, 2) buffer storage between the work stations are critical measure for determining the degree of work-load unbalancing.