Article ID: | iaor19992373 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 49 |
Issue: | 6 |
Start Page Number: | 647 |
End Page Number: | 658 |
Publication Date: | Jun 1998 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | Dowsland Kathryn A., Dowsland W.B., Bennell J.A. |
This paper introduces a new improvement heuristic for irregular cutting and packing problems. The method is based on a small number of repetitions of any leftmost placement policy and is particularly effective in situations where computation time is strictly limited but exceeds that required for a single pass approach. Both the algorithm and the geometry required for implementation are described in full and the results of computational experiments on a variety of data are presented. These results show that the algorithm is an effective technique for producing good packings.