Abstract:
The today’s competitive advantage of ready-made garment industry depends on the ability
to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of resource utilization. Ready-made garment
industry has long historically adopted fewer technological and process advancement as
compared to automotive, electronics and semiconductor industries. Simulation modeling of
garment assembly line has attracted a number of researchers as one way for insightful analysis
of the system behaviour and improving its performance. However, most of simulation
studies have considered ill-defined experimental design which cannot fully explore the
assembly line design alternatives and does not uncover the interaction effects of the input
variables. Simulation metamodeling is an approach to assembly line design which has
recently been of interest to researchers. However, its application in garment assembly line
design has never been well explored. In this paper, simulation metamodeling of trouser
assembly line with 72 operations was demonstrated. The linear regression metamodel technique
with resolution-V design was used. The effects of five factors: bundle size, job release
policy, task assignment pattern, machine number and helper number on throughput of the
trouser assembly line were studied. An increase of the production throughput by 28.63%
was achieved for the best factors’ setting of the metamodel.
