A prolog program for decomposing clothing orders into lays

  • Authors:

  • David A. Rosenblueth

  • Affiliations:

  • Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

We describe a Prolog program for solving a problem occurring in the clothing industry. The input of the problem is a clothing "order," consisting of a number of requested garments for each size. The output is a decomposition of the given order into "lays," producing exactly the requested number of garments per size. We wish to minimize both the fabric and the labor costs. For each lay we are only interested in knowing how many copies of the set of pieces of each size are to be placed (we do not deal with the geometrical problem of placing such pieces). Computing an optimal decomposition can be viewed as a generalization of the bin-packing problem.Our system uses an enumerative, branch-and-bound method to traverse a search space. This approach resulted practical only for orders with up to seven sizes. However, since most of the orders in the firm where we found this problem have exactly this number of sizes, our system is useful in spite of having this limitation.