Empirical Analysis of the Learning Curve Principle in Prestressed Concrete Piles

Production economics and the learning curve: A meta-analysis

“…Table 7 Field studies industry type. Adler and Clark (1991) Electronic equipment manufacturing Bevis et al (1970) Fessia et al (2007 Macher and Mowery (2003) Nembhard and Osothsilp (2001) Towill (1977) Almgren (1999 Automotive parts manufacturing Foster and Adam (1996) Franceschini and Galetto (2004) Hinze and Olbina (2009) Construction Jarkas and Horner (2011) Bevis et al (1970) Tobacco manufacture Chambers and Johnston (2000) Aviation service Lapré (2011) Household products manufacturer warehouse Huntley (2003) Software service Junginger et al (2006) Energy generation Levy (1965) Commercial printing Nembhard and Uzumeri (2000) Textile manufacturing Towill (1990) Electrical inspection Towill et al (1989) Machine-building Uzumeri and Nembhard (1998) Manufacturing…”

“…To fit learning curves to the empirical data, the parameters of the learning curves were estimated within their respective ranges by using the least squares method, where the relevant parameter ranges where taken from the original works that proposed the learning curves considered in this paper. This method has frequently been used in the past to fit learning curves to empirical data (e.g., Bevis et al, 1970;Hackett, 1983;Hinze and Olbina, 2009;Glock and Jaber, 2014). We formulate the objective function for fitting learning curves to the empirical data as follows:…”

“…Empirical studies focused on measuring learning by collecting empirical data, either in laboratory settings or in field studies. Learning effects were observed in various areas, such as assembly production (Shafer et al, 2001;Smunt and Watts, 2003), online ordering in supply chains (Kull et al, 2007), manual order picking , or construction (Hinze and Olbina, 2009), to name just a few examples. Although the concept of learning curves in the field of production economics has been introduced almost a century ago, it is still of importance for manufacturing firms, for example as a performance measure, an aid in setting labor standards, a forecasting tool, or an application in decision support tools.…”

The effect of worker learning on manual order picking processes

“…Learning that results from repetitive manual work in industrial settings has been studied in empirical works, see for example Ittner et al (2001), Macher and Mowery (2003) and Nembhard (2000), who studied manual assembly production processes. Further empirical evidence for learning in production can be found in Hinze and Olbina (2009) and Thomas et al (1986), who studied construction processes, and in Kim and Seo (2009), who analyzed shipbuilding processes. Works that investigated learning in laboratory settings are the ones of Kvålseth (1978), Bailey (1989) and Shtub et al (1993), for example.…”

An Estimation of the Learning Curve Effect on Project Scheduling with Working Days Calculation

“…There is little information in the literature about the use of learning curves in scheduling, although it seems that the principle of learning curves gathers ground in the scheduling of repetitive construction operations (Hinze andOlbina, 2008, Fini et al, 2015). In Zahran et al, 2016, the learning curve effect on linear scheduling method is discussed.…”