Elucidating a layout problem in the fashion industry by using an ant optimisation approach

Abstract

The clothing industry increasingly emphasises the production of high-fashion garments. Particular factors, such as various consumer behaviours, and the development of ‘fast fashion’, have motivated the manufacturers to reduce the production time. The most economic cutting patterns can be identified rapidly to control cost and reduce production time. This study focuses on a layout problem for cutting patterns in the fashion industry. The aim is to minimise combined setup cost, excess cost and layer cost. An integer programming (IP) model is utilised to obtain the optimal solution. Ant colony optimisation (ACO) and IP are combined as a novel algorithm, called advisory committee on immunisation practices (ACIP), to search for suboptimal solutions. Computational results show that ACIP is efficient.

Keywords:

• fashion industry
• cutting patterns
• integer programming
• ant colony optimisation