Cutting Stock Problem
The cutting-stock problem is an optimization problem, or more specifically, an integer linear programming problem. It arises from many applications in industry. Imagine that you work in a paper mill and you have a number of rolls of paper of fixed width waiting to be cut, yet different customers want different numbers of rolls of various-sized widths. How are you going to cut the rolls so that you minimize the waste (amount of left-overs)?
Solving this problem to optimality can be economically significant: a difference of 1% for a modern paper machine can be worth more than one million USD per year.
Read more about Cutting Stock Problem: Formulation and Solution Approaches, Illustration of One-dimensional Cutting-stock Problem, Classification, Cutting-stock Problem in Paper, Film and Metal Industries, History
Famous quotes containing the words cutting, stock and/or problem:
“Babies are necessary to grown-ups. A new baby is like the beginning of all things—wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities. In a world that is cutting down its trees to build highways, losing its earth to concrete ... babies are almost the only remaining link with nature, with the natural world of living things from which we spring.”
—Eda Le Shan (b. 1922)
“I’d rather I were dead and gone,
And my body laid in grave,
Ere a rusty stock o coal-black smith
My maidenhead should have.”
—Unknown. The Twa Magicians (l. 17–20)
“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)