The Review of Mark Planning Problem

Mark planning is one of the most important planning processes in garment industry. The major function is to generate a set of markers which is used as cutting guidelines or cutting templates in a cutting process. In other words, this process can be seen as a planning step of a cutting process which determines what sequence and how many parts will be cut. For the academic point of view, mark planning has been of interests for more than 15 years. Many papers are published with various objective functions, problem scenarios, and constraints. Therefore, key content summary of these papers are useful for researchers who are interested in this type of problem. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an exhaustive review of mark planning papers which is composed of three sections: the relevant background, the summary of reviewed papers, and the relationship between objective functions which is cost combinations and major garment characteristics. In conclusion, future researches should go forward the trend of integration between this process and other relevant processes in the production chain, e.g. cut scheduling, assembly planning, marker making.