The cutting stock problem with multiple manufacturing modes applied to a construction industry

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of multiple manufacturing modes integrated into the cutting stock problem, based on a real-life application of the concrete pole manufacturing. The main aim is to propose, formulate and test this integrated problem, which can be applied to the construction industry and other contexts of multiple manufacturing modes with cutting processes. The motivation for this proposal is the construction industry, in which reinforced concrete structures can be reinforced by various combinations of one-dimensional steel bars of varying thicknesses and lengths. An integer programming mathematical formulation is proposed aiming to minimise the total cost and to meet a demand of final products with different possible configurations. A column generation procedure is used as the solution method together with a heuristic procedure to find an integer solution. Computational results were performed with practical instances in order to assess the value of the approach and with a set of random generated instances in order to explore the influence of parameters on the results. Some managerial insights are presented.

Keywords:

• cutting stock problems
• integer programming
• multiple modes
• construction industry
• integrated problems
• column generation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Felipe Kesrouani Lemos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0488-7839

Adriana Cristina Cherri http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1934-4682

Silvio Alexandre de Araujo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4762-2048

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq (Process numbers 421130/2018-0, 305261/2018-5, 306558/2018-1 and 406335/2018-4) and Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo - FAPESP (Process number 2013/07375-0 and 2016/01860-1).