Production planning

This operational research study is concerned with the production of iron bars used in ferroconcrete building. More precisely, the main problem is to plan the cuttings of bars according to the customer orders. The production plans should on the one hand increase the production and on the other hand reduce the iron waste. The solution developed is composed of: (1) A greedy heuristic dividing the planning problem into subproblems: A plan is a sequence of cuttings of bars. (2) An exact algorithm solving the subproblems: Finding the best next cutting. This paper also briefly presents the introduction of this operational research software in the factory and its impact on the production. This actual case study will allow the reader to assess the potential benefit of combining operational research methods and relational database techniques.