How does human work behaviour affect the design of serial production lines?
研究了人类工作行为（如加速压力和疲劳）对串行异步生产线设计的影响，发现资源分配需优先考虑缓冲区分布以最小化产出波动，且最优设计违背传统规则。
Behavioral research and experimental evidence support the notion that human operators behave differently than machines. The literature indicates that when humans are likely to cause idleness in their immediate environment, they tend to increase their work pace. We analytically investigate the effect of social human work behaviour for designing serial asynchronous production lines. Specifically, we study the optimal allocation of the total workload and buffer space among workstations by modelling the processing times of human operators using a continuous-time Markov chain to optimise expected output or output variability. Our findings suggest that the speed-up pressure and fatigue of human work behaviour when distributing system resources have significant impact and should not be ignored. Furthermore, to minimise deviations from expected performance in a system with high processing time variability, the right distribution of buffer spaces should be prioritised over the allocation of total workload. Finally, our results show that in a system with human operators: (1) the workload allocation that maximises throughput violates all three properties of the classical bowl-phenomenon: reversibility, symmetrical allocation, and monotonicity, (2) optimum designs for output variability differs from the traditional guidelines, (3) pure buffer allocation can be more effective than pure workload allocation if output variability is minimised.