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Simulation based Optimization on Mattress Manufacturing Line

Conference Paper · October 2014

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Abstract#: 338
Stream#: 2

Simulation based Optimization on

Mattress Manufacturing Line

Murat Sari*, Abdullah H. Kokcam and Emin Gundogar

Sakarya University, Industrial Engineering Department, Sakarya, Turkey

*muratsari@sakarya.edu.tr

ABSTRACT

As all manufacturing sectors has a fierce competition between them furniture sector is no
exception. Customer demands on furniture products varies and changes in time that enforce the
companies to increase their productivity by reengineering their operations on production lines. In this
study, spring mattress manufacturing line of a furniture manufacturing company is analysed
analytically. It is intended to find the bottlenecks in production line to balance the semi-finished
material flow. In bottleneck elimination process four base points should be investigated, which are
bottlenecks in Method, Material, Machine and Man (work force) resources, respectively. These
bottlenecks are investigated and several different scenarios are tested to improve current
manufacturing system. Probable near optimal alternatives are determined by system models built in
Arena 13.5 simulation software.

KEYWORDS - Optimization Based Simulation, Bottleneck Search, Spring Mattress Manufacturing.

1 INTRODUCTION

Today companies have to meet the ever-shifting demands of customers by producing variety of
products in timely fashion with minimum costs to compete with the other companies. It is more
explicit in furniture sector, which is essential for everyday life of people. A furniture company which
produces different furniture families such as panel furniture, living room set, bedroom set, mattresses,
bases, sitting groups, and sofa sets is investigated in this study. The company takes order from wide
range of dealers and transports products to sub-sellers directly.
This study focuses on spring mattress manufacturing line that company works with make-to-
order discipline for this department. To understand the interested problem materials that used in a
classical spring mattress are shown in Figure 1.
 Figure 1. The structure of classical spring mattress.
Spring mattress manufacturing line consists of eight work stations which are Spring Knitting,
Gluing, Fabric Quilting, Overlock, Upholstering, Sewing, Quality control and Packaging. The
mattress manufacturing process starts in two different lines. Mattress frame is built in the Spring
Knitting station at the first line. Then appropriately sized felt and foam rubber are glued up to that
mattress frame in the glue station. The second branch of manufacturing line consists of Fabric
Quilting and Overlock stations. Fabric, buckram, wadding and foam rubber are sewn with appropriate
designs (pattern) according to the features of mattress that will be produced. After that quilted fabric
is overlocked if necessary. After the completion of processes in these two lines semi-finished products
(mattress frame and quilted fabrics) are combined in Upholstering station. Top and bottom quilted
fabrics and lateral fabric (called bordure) are combined with straight bindings process in Sewing
station. In Quality control station, scrap suture strands are removed from spring mattresses and
physical examination test is executed. Finally, the spring mattress is packaged automatically in the
package station. Main steps of spring mattress manufacturing process are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Standard mattress manufacturing process.

2 PROBLEM DEFINITION

A point of congestion in any system from computer networks to a factory assembly line is
described with the term “bottleneck”. In a system that have bottleneck problem there is always some
process, task, machine, etc. that is the limiting factor preventing a greater throughput and thus
determines the capacity of the entire system. Knowing the bottleneck allows increasing the flow by
improving just one process in the system rather than all its remaining parts. Vice versa, if there is a
bottleneck, nothing done elsewhere in the value stream can improve the throughput [7]. Bottleneck
detection in a production system is not a simple task. Current bottleneck detection methods can be
divide into two categories as analytical and simulation-based. Analytical methods are adequate and
reasonable for long term analysis but not appropriate for short term analysis as they can give
misleading results in a short interval. Simulation based methods have disadvantages such as time
required for modelling as different scenarios needs different models.
Leporis and Králová [11] applied several methods in simulation environment to detect
bottlenecks in manufacturing processes and compared the advantages and constraints of these
methods. Burkarda et al. [14] studied the production optimization of a chemical production industry.
Efficiency problems of such industries are in NP-Hard class problems and it is impossible to find
optimum solution in reasonable time. Baki and Vickson [13] investigated the classical two machine
single operator problem under the open shop and flow shop scenarios. In this problem bottlenecks are
created by adding different constraints (variable setup times, number of delaying jobs) to indicate that
problem becomes NP-Hard. They used four pseudo-polynomial algorithm to create production
schedule under this constraints.
Bottleneck detection and elimination methods have been studied since the industrial revolution.
This problem is still important in manufacturing sector with the development of new methods and
techniques especially heuristic algorithms and simulation based methods [4,9,17,18].
Li et al. [10] developed turning point method for bottleneck detection and verified their results
both with analytical and simulation based analysis. A special conception of bottleneck detection has
been developed based on evaluation of the real-time data from the manufacturing system. Bottleneck
elimination process has four main steps which should be investigated thoroughly. These are
bottlenecks in method, material, machine and man (workforce), respectively [15]. This study focuses
on machine, physical workforce and material bottlenecks. In the literature, this type of research is
frequently studied such as [1], [16], [19], and [21]. Also simulation based optimization techniques
are applied in numerous studies [5, 6].
First of all diversities in products are a stumbling block for product standardization in the
company. Furthermore, demands are heavily affected by seasonal fluctuation. Coping with
fluctuations are very difficult. To fulfil such demand needs high quantities of semi-finished and
finished products and there are limited storage space to keep them. Company uses the make to order
manufacturing policy to overcome this problem.
Discontinuity in manufacturing is second problem because required setup times for different
products slow down the flow of production, especially for quilting machine. Simulation methods are
widely applied to investigate and estimate bottleneck problems in a workflow. The aim of the study
is to improve the flow of products by reducing bottlenecks in production line using simulation tools.
In current situation company can produce 200 units and want to increase its capacity to over 360 units
of products. This is a case study to increase the production based on data that have been gathered
from a factory by modelling discrete event simulation of the production line. Detailed analysis of the
production line is given in Application section.
3 APPLICATION

Roughly, 20 different types of mattresses are manufactured by the company and each has seven
different sizes. However, the most demanded five types of mattress are determined with Pareto
analysis to be used in simulation application. (The effect of other demands are neglected). Each type
of selected mattress frame is manufactured from a different type of bonnel spring. Other specifications
of these mattresses are listed in Table 1. Company administration is declared that fabric quilting and
packaging stations cannot be changed in terms of capacity, because of the high investment costs as
this adds up a constraint in this problem.

Table 1. Specifications of mattresses.

Type Fabric Comfort Overlock Size (cm)
A Jacquard Ergonomic No 90*190
B Jacquard Ergonomic No 70*180
C Non-sweat Ultra Ergonomic Yes 150*200
D Non-sweat Ultra Ergonomic Yes 150*200
E Jacquard Standard No 150*200
In each production period manufacturing line should be re-balanced because of the changes in
product range. Line balancing is focused on workers and machine capacity. In the first step, different
iterative simulation scenarios are tried to increase daily mattress production, and the second step is
concentrated on types and locations of buffer stocks (after the spring knitting, fabric quilting, gluing,
and overlock stations) to run manufacturing line without a hitch.
Production line flow is observed and analysed thoroughly to accomplish this purpose. Setup
and process times of all processes are determined using time study and statistically evaluated using
"Arena input analyser" software [2].
In this analysis, goodness of fit (chi-square) tests are applied. Mean square error of tests is
considered to be less than 5%. Results of time study and input analysis are too long to include in this
paper so an example of these analyses are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Time study.

 After the work study analyses, machine setup times, current capacities of stations and
changeability of capacity are given in Table 2. Processing time matrix of stations are given in Table
3. DES flow diagram of manufacturing model is given in Figure 4. A general simulation model based
on this diagram is embedded in Arena Simulation Software. This closed loop algorithm updates
iterative models by using current simulation model [3,12,20]. Each generated simulation model has
run for 30 times assuming eight work hours in a day. Performance measure is the quantity of daily
manufacturing outputs of the mattresses.

Table 2. Machines’ specification.

Machine codes Machine name Setup times (min) Current capacity Changeability of capacity
r1 Spring Knitting 15 2 YES
r2 Glue 15 2 YES
r3 Fabric quilting 10 1 N/A
r4 Overlock N/A 1 YES
r5 Upholster N/A 1 YES
r6 Sewing 1.56 2 YES
r7 Quality control N/A 2 YES
r8 Package 3.23 2 N/A

Table 3. Processing time matrix (min).

Product Name Spring Knitting Glue Fabric quilting Overlock
Type A unif(4.07,6.83,seed1) norm(3.70,0.52,seed6) norm(0.52,0.05,seed11) n/a
Type B unif(2.03,3.26,seed2) norm(2.04,0.26,seed7) norm(0.47,0.13,seed12) n/a
Type C unif(4.39,6.42,seed3) norm(3.93,0.93,seed8) norm(0.71,0.05,seed13) unif(1.10,1.59,seed16)
Type D unif(4.39,6.42,seed4) norm(3.67,0.55,seed9) norm(0.71,0.05,seed14) unif(1.10,1.59,seed17)
Type E unif(4.39,6.42,seed5) norm(3.93,0.93,seed10) norm(0.63,0.06,seed15) n/a

Product Name Covering/Upholster Sewing Quality control Package

Type A norm(2.43,0.25,seed18) unif(2.50,5.00,seed23) norm(0.82,0.35,seed28) 0.65
Type B norm(1.40,0.19,seed19) unif(1.75,3.34,seed24) norm(0.79,0.35,seed29) 0.67
Type C norm(2.34,0.15,seed20) unif(3.29,5.80,seed25) norm(1.46,0.18,seed30) 0.78
Type D norm(2.34,0.15,seed21) unif(3.29,5.80,seed26) norm(1.46,0.18,seed31) 0.78
Type E norm(2.34,0.15,seed22) unif(3.29,5.80,seed27) norm(1.46,0.18,seed32) 0.78

Figure 4. DES flow diagram of manufacturing model.

4 RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

Evaluation of the simulation results shows that the current bottleneck in manufacturing line is
Spring Knitting station. One unit capacity increase in Spring Knitting station increases specific
amount of daily production and bottleneck shifts to Glue station.
An iterative algorithm [8] is utilised to improve the balance and efficiency of production line
by increasing the production capacities of the stations. At the eighth scenario Fabric quilting was
become bottleneck station. At this point, another scenario was not created because required
investment cost for the quilting machine is very high, that will not return its value in a short time.
Iterative scenarios and their daily production results in terms of various resource capacity are given
in Table 4. Final results of production quantities in terms of various buffer stocks are given in Table
5. In these tables, average productions are calculated through mean of five kind of spring mattress
productions. S0 represents current situation of spring mattress manufacturing department. Si
represents i.th scenario of simulation study. In addition to that half-width values of production results
are given at Table 6.

Table 4. Production results of iterative simulation running (in terms of various resource capacity).
Scenario Resource capacity A B C D E Average Production
S0 r1=2, r2=2, r4=1, r5=1, r6=2 165,90 323,06 165,50 165,40 165,36 197,04
S1 r1=3, r2=2, r4=1, r5=1, r6=2 185,43 325,30 166,76 167,16 191,36 207,20
S2 r1=3, r2=3, r4=1, r5=1, r6=2 186,46 325,80 166,76 167,16 192,30 207,70
S3 r1=4, r2=3, r4=1, r5=1, r6=2 187,46 325,80 166,76 167,16 193,60 208,16
S4 r1=3, r2=2, r4=1, r5=2, r6=2 237,16 358,66 166,76 167,16 197,50 225,45
S5 r1=4, r2=3, r4=1, r5=2, r6=3 331,93 490,00 166,83 167,23 297,16 290,63
S6 r1=4, r2=3, r4=2, r5=1, r6=2 187,46 325,80 191,10 191,40 193,60 217,87
S7 r1=4, r2=3, r4=2, r5=2, r6=2 242,40 360,46 197,90 198,03 200,10 239,78
S8 r1=4, r2=3, r4=2, r5=2, r6=3 331,93 490,00 296,76 296,76 297,16 342,52

Table 5. Final results of production quantities (in terms of various buffer stock).
Scenario Buffer Stock A B C D E Average Production
S9 S8 + After from Fabric quilting and Glue 375,53 556,80 310,63 310,16 309,66 372,56

Table 6. Half-width values of production units for scenarios in Table 4 and 5.

Scenario A B C D E
S0 0,49 0,81 0,42 0,42 0,55
S1 0,57 0,69 0,25 0,45 0,33
S2 0,59 0,70 0,25 0,45 0,34
S3 0,54 0,70 0,25 0,45 0,41
S4 0,80 1,10 0,25 0,45 0,72
S5 0,76 1,00 0,28 0,44 0,91
S6 0,54 0,70 0,20 0,32 0,41
S7 0,96 1,07 0,55 0,65 0,76
S8 0,76 1,00 0,73 0,9 0,91
S9 0,52 0,70 0,25 0,45 0,32

Average production output has increased from 197 (current situation) to 342 units a day, only
by enhancements in resource capacities using the last scenario (S8), which has the 4, 3, 1, 2, 2, 3, 1
and 1 resource capacity for Spring Knitting, Glue, Fabric quilting, Overlock, Upholster, Sewing,
Quality control and Package station, respectively. An analysis of the S8 results indicates that some of
resources have a material starvation, systemically. Using specific amount of semi-finished buffer
stocks contributes to elimination of discrepancies that occasionally occurs. Various simulation
scenarios are tried to determine the better buffer stock type and buffer location. Selected scenarios
and their daily production results are illustrated in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Comparison of production results of selected scenarios.

In conclusion, the ideal scenario is found as scenario S9 that buffer stock must be located after
Fabric quilting and Glue station which are determined according to scenario S8. As a result, amount
of average production is reached 372 units by using buffer stocks and capacity enhancements.

5 FUTURE WORK

Evaluation of the simulation results shows that the current bottleneck in manufacturing line is
Spring Knitting station. One unit capacity increase in Spring Knitting station increases specific
amount of daily production and bottleneck shifts to Glue station.
Amount of buffer stocks are designed at high level in the simulation scenarios because this
study is not interested in how much buffer stock should be kept. In further research, studying on
keeping the minimum amount of the buffer stock is planned.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research is supported by Sakarya University Scientific Research Projects Coordinatorship

(BAPK) with 2013-50-02-004 project number.

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