Abstract

This work is aimed at investigating the impact of labor flexibility and machine flexibility in the response capability of a production system in the clothing industry. To do this the response capability of a production system is modeled as a function of different flexibilities. From this model a 32 factorial experimental design is configured, which is implemented in the Arena 7.01 simulation language. The results show greater importance of machine flexibility compared to labor flexibility for the types of variability studied, and the performance of a production system when a high level of flexibility is used is similar to that in which a medium level is used. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.