Garment Assembly Line Balancing Using Modeling and Simulation

Assembly line balancing of garment industry became an important area for research. The objective of this study is to develop a simulation model which represents real production process scenarios based on balancing U3 Shirt assembly line in Sur Military Clothing Factory that helps to decrease the waiting time, finish time, and increase the efficiency of the line in addition to generating different alternative scenarios to utilize the assembly line. The methodology adopted includes firstly calculation of cycle time of U3 Shirt assembly line process by using time study, secondly, to set up a model and simulation of the line which was achieved by using different tools and technologies: MySQL Data Base Management System (DBMS), Java language, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Cascades Style Sheets (CSS) and SMARTY J. Several scenarios were created to enhance the system. Three scenarios were proposed and the best one had a result of a finish time decremented to be 24113s, the second scenario was 26603s while the third gave 26622s compared to 29616 seconds for the real scenario finish time. The efficiency of the line is increased to 19%, 10%, and 10% for the three scenarios respectively. The cost of the three alternative scenarios was increased by 9%, 15% and 3% from the real system cost consecutively. The study concluded that the real scenario case could be enhanced to be more effective by using the best scenario result that was created by using scenario 1 which saves more time, and had more efficiency.