Assortment problems with cutting policies

Assortment selection problems with cutting policies play an important role in several industries but, possibly due to their combinatorial characteristics, they did not receive as much attention as cutting stock problems did, though the two problems are closely related. In this paper we graph several examples of cost functions of one- and two-dimensional problems which reveal that many local optima with cost close to optimum exist. Several implementations of known meta-heuristics are tested with a real problem. Two different neighborhood structures are considered and the different performance of the implemented heuristics is briefly discussed.