An Artificial Intelligence Method for Planning the Clothing Manufacturing Process

In clothing manufacturing, manufacturers are now facing difficulty with production planning and scheduling as their customers apply the just-in-time philosophy to their businesses. Although various production scheduling and planning heuristics have been proposed and applied by many researchers, only a few studies have been conducted in the clothing industry. This paper describes the development of an effective artificial intelligence technique, Genetic Algorithm (GA), incorporated with an ‘earliness’ and ‘tardiness’ production scheduling and planning method to plan the clothing manufacturing process. Additionally, a segmentation strategy is developed to divide the production-planning period to overcome the problem of chromosome selection in GA. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the clothing manufacturing process.