How much cloth does marker making waste, and do annealing and exact methods beat greedy nesting?
research/garment-nesting
Marker making as strip packing: on 20 random 8-box markers, shelf heuristics leave 17–20% extra length vs the exact optimum, annealing 0.5%; on two stylised garments, polygon nesting beats box packing at equal budget. Stylised; no seam allowance or multi-ply.
What it found
Marker making as strip packing. On 20 random 8-box markers an exact MILP proves optimality on 19; shelf heuristics (NFDH, FFDH) are on average 20% and 17% longer than optimal, bottom-left 7.3%, and simulated annealing over placement order 0.5%. On two stylised garments (a shirt and a four-gore skirt, no seam allowance, one ply) true-polygon nesting with 180° turns beats bounding-box packing at the same annealing budget in every case, by about 5–9% for the shirt and 9–43% for the skirt. Stylised: the shapes are invented, polygon results have no exact reference, and the raster is conservative.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
More in Engineered clothing
- What do seam allowance and mixed sizes do to marker efficiency, and what does that do to a garment's cloth cost?A 1 cm seam allowance cut the stylised shirt's marker efficiency from 0.69 to 0.63 and the skirt's from 0.71 to 0.51; mixing three sizes in one marker shortened it 9%; swapped into the cost model, trench cloth rises from $26 to $33–41 at $7/m². Stylised; sensitivity, not a coat measurement.
- How much cloth does a cutting plan save by mixing sizes in one marker, and is the saving real?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.
- How far is a fixed 0.80 marker efficiency from a nested coat, and what does the difference do to the cost model?Nesting a stylised coat's 10 shell and 5 lining pieces with a 1.5 cm seam allowance gives marker efficiencies of 0.68–0.73 (shell) and 0.59–0.68 (lining) at three cloth widths, below the fixed 0.80 in
garment-teardown; its trench FOB moves +9% to +15% at the teardown's own areas. Stylised, preliminary. - How many clothing sizes does it take to fit a population, and does a regular S-M-L grid waste them?How many sizes fit a population? On a stylised synthetic bust/hip population (+-4 cm), an exact size run beats a regular grid by 12 to 25 points at correlation 0.9 but not on fresh people at correlation 0; greedy is within 3.7 points of optimal (stylised, preliminary).
- How many clothing sizes does a stretch fabric save?How many sizes does a stretch fabric save? On a stylised synthetic bust/hip population, 10% usable stretch cuts the sizes needed for 80% fit from 6 to more than 8 down to 2 or 3; an idealised upper bound (preliminary).
- How much comfort can an infrared-transparent or gating textile buy, and which fabric properties matter?Fanger/ISO PMV and a two-node model extended with fabric infrared transmittance, emissivity and solar absorptance: indoors, transmittance 0→0.8 is worth ~2.4 °C of comfort at 28 °C; in sun, absorptance dominates. Stylised; assumed fabric properties, no reference for the optical extension.
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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.