The development of heuristic for solving multi objective mark planning problem in garment industry

Mark planning is an important process of garment manufacturing. The main function is to generate a set of markers that will be used as cutting patterns in cutting process. In this paper, multi objective mark planning is formulated as integer nonlinear programming (INLP.) which nonlinear terms occurred in both objective and constraints. Moreover, objective functions consist of set up cost, excess part cost and total standard deviation. Constraint programming approach established in ILOG-CP is used to investigate the complexity and difficulty of this proposed problem. However, this method takes too long computational time before obtaining the optimal solution. Hence, the heuristic approach designed based on the hierarchical improvement and decomposition concept together with special properties of this problem is developed. In this method, each objective component will be sequentially manipulated and improved with respect to their relative priorities. To verify this developed heuristic, many test instances which partially relate to industrial information are generated and tested. The developed heuristic is shown to give the comparable solutions in reasonable computational time compare with ideal point which is derived from solving three single objective models in many test instances.