A new heuristic for rectangular stock-cutting problem

One of the important problems being faced in industry is to find appropriate patterns to cut sheets in order to have a production process with minimum material loss. The problem receives notable attention in several industries, such as steel, textile, paper, glass, wood, etc. In this paper, a new heuristic is proposed to cut rectangular objects with pre-specified length and width from a rectangular stock with limited width and unlimited length. In the proposed algorithm, two sorted lists are used concurrently, one for rectangles and another for positions produced during packing, and the algorithm adaptively decides about the list to be used. The proposed algorithm obtains promising results compared with those previously published in the literature. Extensive computational testing on the problem instances from the literature shows the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.