Strips minimization in two-dimensional cutting stock of circular items

Circular items are often produced from stock plates using the cutting and stamping process that consists of two stages. A guillotine machine divides the plate into strips at the cutting stage, and then a press punches out the items from the strips at the stamping stage. The cutting cost at the first stage often increases with the number of strips in the cutting plan. An approach is presented for the two-dimensional cutting stock problem of the strips at the cutting stage. The objective is to minimize the sum of the material and the cutting costs. The approach formulates the problem as an integer linear programming, and uses a column generation method for generating the cutting patterns. The cutting patterns have the feature that each cut on the plate produces just one strip. The computational results indicate that the approach can greatly reduce the number of strips in the cutting plan.