Enhancing the scheduling performance of a knitting mill

Abstract

Continuously changing customer desires increase the product variety and volatility of the orders and this makes scheduling harder in textile industry. So the companies have to schedule their production effectively to meet the demand of their customers in due dates. In this paper, the effect of different dispatching rules and batching on the production performance of a knitting mill was examined via simulation. While the orders were assigned to the machines with FIFO (first in, first out) rule without batching in current system, a new system was proposed by which the orders were batched and then were assigned to the machines with FIFO, LIFO (last in, first out), LVF (low value first) and HVF (high value first) dispatching rules. The performances of the current and proposed systems were compared in terms of total number of setups, total production time, average machine utilization and average queue length performance criterions. HVF rule with batching system gave the best results for the above determined performance criterions and improved the performance of the current system.