PROCESS OPTIMIZATION ON GENERALIZED TRAVELING SALESMAN PROBLEM OF THE AUTOMATIC CUTTING PATH PLAN FOR GARMENT CNC CUTTING SYSTEM

In recent years, the digital garment manufacturing equipment is becoming to be more and more qualified for the automatic performances such as speed, accuracy and so on. The CNC cutting system is one of the most important component in the advanced digital garment system. The improvement of its work efficiency is a hard issue for the optimization of garment production process. In general, the cutting path of garment CNC cutting system can be classified by two types, the efficient cutting path around each garment pattern and the non-cutting stroke between two patterns. Decreasing the consumption of the later one will improve the whole pattern cutting process. In this paper, the study on optimizing the garment cutting path plan is based on a special issue of generalized traveling salesman problem (GTSP). To solve this GTSP, an intelligent integrated algorithm, mainly composed by Ant Colony Algorithm and the nearest neighbor Algorithm, is proposed in order to generate optimized cutting path. This new algorithm will improve the process of cutting by the current garment cutting equipment by avoiding the waste of non-cutting stroke.