| Article ID: | iaor20021238 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 31 |
| Issue: | 7 |
| Start Page Number: | 639 |
| End Page Number: | 651 |
| Publication Date: | Jun 1999 |
| Journal: | IIE Transactions |
| Authors: | Sewell E.C., Lee H.F. |
| Keywords: | manufacturing industries |
This paper addresses the problem of minimizing the amount of wasted space when cutting a set of rectangular pieces from a single rectangular sheet of stock material. A simulated annealing algorithm is developed and is shown to significantly outperform three existing heuristics on a set of 37 real-world data sets. In addition, a mathematical programming formulation of the problem and several theoretical lower bounds are developed and used to demonstrate that the simulated annealing solutions are within 9.5 of the optimal solution, on average.