A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON DESIGNING OF A CLOTHING ASSEMBLY LINE

Assembly line balancing has taken the attention of researchers. There are many theoretical studies which propose mathematical or heuristic methods and some of these studies compare the performances of different assembly line balancing techniques. However, there are few practical studies which solve real world assembly line problem. Besides it is not often to meet a study that compares the performance of proposed heuristics with real world practical assembly line balancing techniques. In this study, the sewing line of a woman blouse was balanced with two different real world practical assembly line balancing techniques (PT-1 and PT- 2) and Rank Positional Weight heuristic(RPW) with different objectives. Firstly, this study aimed to contribute to decrease the deficiency of practical applications on assembly line balancing in literature. The second purpose was to compare the performances of practical techniques PT-1 and PT- 2 with the performance of RPW heuristic. Apart from that, PT-1/RPW and PT-2/RPW combinations were made and the performances of these newly developed techniques, together with the performances of PT-1, PT-2 and RPW were discussed in order to outline some points that can improve the efficiency of assembly lines as the third objective.