"An exact and heuristic approach for the sequencing cutting problem"
Daniel Cuellar Usaquén, David Alvarez Martinez, Marcelo Botero Gomez, Alejandro Palacio Alvarez and Emilia Ospina Arango

The material cutting process consists of two highly complex problems: First, it is necessary to find the optimal cutting pattern or location of the pieces within the plate such that the used area is maximized. Second, it is necessary to find the cutting sequence over the plate so that the pieces are extracted in the shortest possible time. The structure of the sequencing cutting problem can vary according to the technology used in the process. In the literature, this problem is addressed through exact and approximate optimization. In industries where material can be considered a commodity, the sequencing phase is decisive due to the need to achieve an economic and efficient operation. Due to this fact, the computing time required by the optimization methodology is included as part of the problem’s total processing time. These types of minimization demand heuristic processes to be specialized in such a way that a good solution is guaranteed, and exact models to use non conventional formulation techniques in search of computational efficiency. This study shows an exact and heuristic approach to solve the bidimensional sequencing cutting problem, under the use of an industrial manipulator integrated to a plasma cutter. Both approaches are compared through bench marking, using the classic cutting instances from the literature. The possibility to analyze and include the quality of the pieces, given the cutting sequence, is left as a future work proposal.