A methodology for determining cutting stock sizes and cutting patterns

This paper considers a real-world cutting problem arising from caravan manufacturing companies. For each caravan large stock sizes have to be cut into smaller sizes required for finishing the front panels of the furniture. In order to minimize the total cost of the stock material needed for cutting the smaller sizes for all units of all caravan models of a yearly production plan, the best combination of stock sizes to keep in inventory has to be selected and for each caravan model the cutting patterns have to be determined. For simultaneously solving the stock size selection problem and a series of cutting pattern selection problems, a methodology based on an enumeration scheme for the possible combinations of different stock sizes and integer linear programming is presented. For the real-world problem under study, the results of the computational experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.