Apparel Advanced Manufacturing Technology Demonstration. Improved Marker Making

The apparel industry has focused in recent years on improving its responsiveness to the marketplace as a means of increasing the industrys competitiveness with overseas manufacturers. One aspect of efficient market response is the marker making process. This paper reports the results of a 12- month study undertaken at Georgia Tech to determine the technical and economic feasibility of improving the state-of-the-art in marker making systems for the apparel industry. Tech researchers have concentrated on three primary areas in performing this study. The initial effort involved contacting commercial vendors of software systems which address the marker making problem. These vendors participated in a survey designed to determine what capabilities exist in current software packages. In addition to talking with the vendors, researchers visited users of the software of each of the participating vendors. These visits allowed for a more unbiased view of the software packages. The next line of pursuit entailed an extensive literature search and analysis of the optimization problem known as the cutting stock problem. Other pertinent literature was studied for both the technical and economic aspects of the project. The final part of the study was to explore new ideas for future research in the marker making problem. Each of these areas are discussed in detail in this report.