A Heuristic Algorithm for the Fabric Spreading and Cutting Problem in Apparel Factories

TL;DR

This paper introduces an iterated greedy heuristic algorithm to optimize fabric spreading and cutting in apparel factories, aiming to minimize material waste and production costs through exact requirement fulfillment and lay minimization.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel iterated greedy algorithm with a constructive and improving phase specifically designed for the fabric spreading and cutting problem in apparel manufacturing.

Findings

The algorithm effectively reduces fabric waste in tested cases.

It minimizes the number of lays needed, lowering production costs.

Experimental results demonstrate efficiency on 500 cases.

Abstract

We study the fabric spreading and cutting problem in apparel factories. For the sake of saving the material costs, the cutting requirement should be met exactly without producing additional garment components. For reducing the production costs, the number of lays that corresponds to the frequency of using the cutting beds should be minimized. We propose an iterated greedy algorithm for solving the fabric spreading and cutting problem. This algorithm contains a constructive procedure and an improving loop. Firstly the constructive procedure creates a set of lays in sequence, and then the improving loop tries to pick each lay from the lay set and rearrange the remaining lays into a smaller lay set. The improving loop will run until it cannot obtain any small lay set or the time limit is due. The experiment results on 500 cases shows that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient.