Scheduling Cutting Process for Large Paper Rolls

TL;DR

This paper models the scheduling of large paper roll cutting as an optimization problem, proposing an integer programming model and a heuristic algorithm to minimize waste efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheduling model for paper roll cutting and develops a heuristic algorithm based on best-fit to solve it effectively.

Findings

The heuristic achieves near-optimal solutions.

The approach has very low computational complexity.

It effectively reduces paper waste.

Abstract

Paper cutting is a simple process of slicing large rolls of paper, jumbo-reels, into various sub-rolls with variable widths based on demands risen by customers. Since the variability is high due to collected various orders into a pool, the process turns to be production scheduling problem, which requires optimisation so as to minimise the final remaining amount of paper wasted. The problem holds characteristics similar one-dimensional bin-packing problem to some extends and differs with some respects. This paper introduces a modelling attempt as a scheduling problem with an integer programming approach for optimisation purposes. Then, a constructive heuristic algorithm revising one of well-known approaches, called Best-fit algorithm, is introduced to solve the problem. The illustrative examples provided shows the near optimum solution provided with very low complexity .