An arc flow-based optimization approach for the two-stage guillotine strip cutting problem

Abstract

Despite its broad range of industrial applications, the two-stage guillotine restriction has received very scant attention in the strip cutting literature. An integer linear programming model that is based on a special graph structure is devised for this strongly NP-hard problem. In addition to being easy to implement, the empirical study on a large set of instances from the literature and from real industrial world cases shows the efficiency of the proposed method while solving instances with high multiplicity factor.

Keywords:

• two-stage cutting stock
• guillotine cutting
• arc-flow model
• strip cutting
• integer programming

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledge the technical and financial support of Research Center of College of Engineering, Deanship of Scientific Research, King Saud University.