A hybrid flowshop scheduling model for apparel manufacture

A hybrid flowshop (HFS) problem on the pre-sewing operations and a master production scheduling (MPS) problem of apparel manufacture are solved by a proposed two-tier scheduling model. The first objective of this paper is to plan a MPS for the factory so that the costs are minimized when the production orders are completed before and after the delivery dates required by the customers. The second objective is to minimize the completion time of the pre-sewing operations in the cutting department while the production quantities required by the sewing department at several predetermined times can be fulfilled by the cutting department. Experimentation is conducted and the results show the excellent performance of the proposed scheduling model for the apparel industry.