Simulating cutting line of a furniture industry

Furniture manufacturing is getting more and more competitive due to shorter product life cycles and ever-increasing customer demand. As a result, furniture manufacturers often need to re-engineer their production lines to satiate the preferences of different consumers. One of the key challenges here is the expense to re-engineer the production lines and to analyze the development of a new product, or a customization on an old product. In today's progressive manufacturing system, simulation of a production line can be invaluable in making re-engineering decisions. With the help of simulation, it is possible to accurately model engineering processes before making drastic changes. In this paper, a simulation model of the cutting line of a furniture manufacturing industry is developed and presented. The resultant model facilitated in identifying two configurations of machine sets. The first one maximized the machine utilization and the second one minimized the waiting time of parts in the queue. The variations of these performance parameters for different batch sizes are also illustrated.