An improved heuristic for the two-dimensional cutting stock problem with multiple sized stock sheets

This paper deals with the problem of cutting multiple sized, rectangular stock sheets into smaller rectangular order pieces to satisfy a given bill of material with minimum him loss. A new heuristic procedure is devised that finds; an effective stock sheet selection sequence, given that the layout procedure used for individual sheets is known. Results for randomly created test problems are compared with those from three previously published procedures. The new heuristic is shown to give a balanced trade-off between trim loss reduction and computational effort, especially as the number of available stock sheet sizes increases.