ABSTRACT
In manufacturing industries, one of the production processes consists of cutting large objects into smaller pieces. In operational research, this process’s study is known as the cutting stock problem (CSP). Due to its difficulty in resolution, heuristics have been developed by researchers in the area. In this work, we propose to use multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques to solve the CSP in a reasonable computational time and aiming to obtain solutions very close to the optimum. Our strategy consists of selecting the best cutting patterns using MCDA techniques and solving the problem only with these chosen patterns. The computational tests showed that the solution obtained with this strategy presents a GAP between 0.25% and 4.25% compared to the optimal solution, giving indications that the proposal is promising.
Keywords:
CSP; MCDA; heuristics