A Cutting Stock and Scheduling Problem in the Copper Industry
针对铜部件制造商Thomas Bolton Ltd的铸造车间，研究如何通过两阶段方法（启发式与整数规划）制定生产计划，在满足瓶颈工序需求的同时最小化成本。
This case study was carried out for Thomas Bolton Ltd, a copper component manufacturer. The focus was on the first major production operation that is carried out in the foundry. This operation consists of three processes — melting scrap metal, casting it as ‘logs’ and cutting logs into ‘billets’. The timely production of the billets is essential as these feed a bottleneck process. The objective of the study was to investigate alternative methods of generating a production plan for the foundry that minimized costs whilst meeting the demand for billets at the bottleneck. The production plan was required to include a daily production schedule and a list of the cutting patterns to use when cutting the logs into billets. Thus, both the scheduling and cutting stock problems were addressed. A two-stage solution procedure was proposed. Alternative heuristic methods were investigated at the first stage and an optimal solution using Integer Programming (IP) was proposed for the second stage. It is shown that current performance could be improved using all of the heuristics considered at the first stage, but that using an IP-based heuristic method gives the best results.