Ad hoc heuristic for the cover printing problem

We address an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem arising in a printing shop. An impression grid is composed by a set of plates. The cover printing problem consists in designing the composition of impression grids, and determining the number of times each grid is to be printed in order to fulfill the demand of different book covers at minimum total printing cost; the latter comes from three fixed costs: for printing one sheet, for producing one plate, and for composing one impression grid. For each cover an unlimited number of plates can be made. To deal with this challenging problem we present an ad hoc heuristic that outperforms all previously proposed approaches, including genetic algorithms, GRASP, and simulated annealing.