An Optimized Algorithm of Numerical Cutting-Path Control in Garment Manufacturing

The garment cutting is a key process during the garment production. Most companies apply the manual labor or simple mechanical aids to achieve the goals. While these methods cost much time and labor. More and more automatic cutting equipment is applied to the garment cutting so as to save time, labor and materials. During the process of cutting, some problems are coming up, especially the cutting path. The cutting path of the garment numerical control cutter is regarded as generalized travelling salesman problem (GTSP). The garment contours can be regarded as the set of cities, and the nodes of a single contour can be regarded as cities. The cutter visits every contour exactly once. A hybrid intelligence algorithm was proposed to solve the problem. The ant colony algorithm was applied to a selected cutting path arbitrarily, an optimal contour sequence was found. Then the garment contour sequences shortest path was transformed into multi-segment graph shortest problem which is solved with the dynamic programming algorithm in order to optimize the knifes in-out point. The final optimal cutting path was constructed with ant colony optimization algorithm and dynamic programming algorithm. The practical application shows that the hybrid intelligence algorithm has satisfactory solution quality.