Determining ideal fabric cutting times for apparel manufacturing by using mixed integer programming and a heuristic method Online publication date: Thu, 29-Jan-2015
by Yi-Feng Hung; Chao-Ying Chang; Hewen Chen
European J. of Industrial Engineering (EJIE), Vol. 8, No. 6, 2014
Abstract: In apparel manufacturing, cut pieces produced by the cutting process are a key input work-in-process (WIP) to the bottleneck sewing process. However, an excessive inventory of cut pieces not only requires extra storage space but also creates difficulties with shop floor control. This study determines the ideal cutting times of fabric lays by minimising the cut piece inventory under the constraint that sufficient cut pieces are produced in time to satisfy the bottleneck usage. This study proposes a mixed integer programming (MIP) model and a heuristic method to solve the problem. The solutions for most test instances of the problem that are calculated by the heuristic method are not as good as those by the MIP solver; however, the heuristic method computation times are negligible. The experiments show that the MIP model's efficiency significantly improves by starting from an initial solution provided by the proposed heuristic method. [Received 30 September 2011; Revised 15 February 2013; Revised 30 July 2013; Accepted 02 August 2013]
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