How much cloth does a cutting plan save by mixing sizes in one marker, and is the saving real?

research/garment-cutplan

Cutting-order planning for a 3-size stylised shirt: laying several garments per marker saves 9–11% of cloth over one per marker; mixing sizes adds 0.4–3.7% in sample, but re-nesting the chosen markers with fresh seeds leaves +0.09%, so it is within nesting noise. Stylised; invented shapes.

7 tests

What it found

Cutting-order planning as an exact integer program (marker mixes and plies) over 34 nested markers of a stylised three-size shirt. Laying several garments per marker saves 9–11% of cloth against one garment per marker on 20 random orders. Mixing sizes adds a further 0.4–3.7% in sample, but re-nesting the markers the plan picked with fresh seeds leaves a +0.09% difference: the gain is within annealing noise (about 5%) and partly selection of luckily short markers. Stylised: invented shirt, linear size grading, small annealing budget, mixes of at most four garments, free setup cost.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/garment-cutplan: cloth — garment-cutplan/experiments/cloth.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.