A simulated annealing heuristic for the one-dimensional cutting stock problem

This paper presents a new simulated annealing approach to the solution of an integer linear programming formulation of the one-dimensional cutting stock problem. Design and implementation issues are discussed – including a thorough statistical analysis of the effects of various parameters on the efficiency and accuracy of solutions. The performance of the new algorithm is compared to that obtained using an existing simulated annealing based methodology, and results presented herein indicate that the new approach consistently generates more efficient solutions with respect to objective value and execution time.