A one-dimensonal cutting stock problem in the aluminium industry and its solution

When producing window frames made out of aluminium one faces the decision problem to determine how many aluminium profiles of a given standard length have to be bought to fulfill production requirements. As results of the currently implemented First Fit Decreasing (FFD) heuristic were regarded unsatisfactorily, a new code-based on the column generation procedure of Gilmore and Gomory-has been developed and supplemented by a one-pass branching up procedure to achieve integrality. Algorithmic details about the integrality achievement phase as well as results obtained when solving real world cutting stock problems on a personal computer are provided.