A Hybrid Planning Process for Improving Fabric Utilization

In the textile and clothing industry, marker planning is a critical operation in the fabric-cutting room, in which pattern pieces of different sizes and styles of a garment are laid out on a sheet of paper with fixed width and arbitrary length in order to achieve the highest fabric utilization (marker efficiency). The layout always contains areas of unusable fabric due to the irregular shapes of garment pattern pieces. The minimization of fabric wastage is crucial to the reduction of production costs. In this study, a methodology that hybridizes a heuristic packing (HP) approach based on grid approximation with an integer representation-based (µ + λ) evolutionary strategy (ES) is proposed in order to obtain an efficient layout of garment patterns so as to optimize the fabric utilization. The performance of the proposed methodology is validated by the experiments and the results demonstrate that the proposed method provides an effective means by which to increase the marker efficiency.