A heuristic algorithm for the fabric spreading and cutting problem in apparel factories

We study the fabric spreading and cutting problem in apparel factories. For the sake of saving the material costs, the cutting requirement should be met exactly without producing additional garment components. For reducing the production costs, the number of lays that corresponds to the frequency of using the cutting beds should be minimized. We propose an iterated greedy algorithm for solving the fabric spreading and cutting problem. This algorithm contains a constructive procedure and an improving loop. Firstly the constructive procedure creates a set of lays in sequence, and then the improving loop tries to pick each lay from the lay set and rearrange the remaining lays into a smaller lay set. The improving loop will run until it cannot obtain any smaller lay set or the time limit is due. The experiment results on 500 cases show that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient.