Abstract:
An original solution method ("Snippy") is developed for the rectangular stock cutting problem, and compared with the commercially available package "OREC" by applying both methods to industrial order books. Arguments are presented to show that the solutions found by Snippy are optimal for all except one of the order books.
Snippy incorporates two innovations. The first is a new method for generating guillotinable cutting patterns, the Trickle Method. This is an incremental dynamic programming technique which is especially suited for interaction with the Simplex Method via column generation. The second development involves a class of non-guillotinable patterns that can be constructed using essentially guillotine techniques. In particular, a relatively minor modification to the Trickle Method allows the generation of good non-guillotinable patterns.