Toward a scheduling model for the metal accessories' suppliers for the fashion industry

The goal of the paper is to present a scheduling model for companies producing metal accessories for the fashion industry. Starting from the description of the challenges that fashion Supply Chain (SC) actors have to face with, the focus has been moved towards the relevance of scheduling problems in that sector. After a literature review on optimization models for the fashion industry, the boundaries of the model have been listed, defining indices and parameters, decision variables, constraints and the Objective Function (OF). Finally, the model has been validated through a case study conducted on a mechanical company. The main result of this paper is the definition of a set of rules suitable for these kind of companies and the validation of the proposed linear integer optimization model in a real scenario, using a commercial spreadsheet and an open source solver. Consequently, the industrial applicability of the proposed tool in the analysed industry has been demonstrated.