Abstract
Some factories use the cutting and stamping processes to divide stock plates into circles to make products. A guillotine machine cuts the plate into strips in the cutting process and then a stamping press punches out circles from the strips in the stamping process. The circles in a strip have the same size. The number of rows of circles in each strip is limited. Under these constraints, this paper addresses the following primary objective: to cut a plate by a guillotine method so that the maximal number of circles is obtained. Then the secondary objective should be optimized: the cutting layout should use a minimal number of strips. The problem is formulated as a bi-objective optimization problem and a recursive algorithm is presented for it. The computational results indicate that the algorithm can efficiently simplify the cutting process.
Acknowledgements
This research is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation Project (60763011) and Guangxi Science Foundation Project (0728100).