Cut scheduling in the apparel industry

A problem encountered in the apparel industry is that of producing, with no excess, a known number of different styles from the same cloth. This situation occurs, for instance, in the case of special order or made-to-order garments. In the cutting process, plies of cloth are spread on a cutting table, and several patterns are placed across the top ply. Cutting out the patterns through all plies creates a set of bundles of garment pieces, and several such lays may be required to satisfy all demands. The cut scheduling problem concerns finding a feasible cutting schedule having the minimum number of lays. We present an exact enumerative approach that identifies all optimal solutions to a practically important variant of this problem. The availability of multiple solutions allows greater flexibility and permits decision makers to apply additional criteria in selecting an appropriate cutting schedule. Computational evidence shows that our approach can efficiently solve standard test problems from the literature as well as some very challenging examples provided by a global garment manufacturer.