Mathematical Modeling and metaheuristics for integrated cutting stock and scheduling problems

• Grant number: 24/16194-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: April 30, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Production Engineering - Operational Research
• Principal Investigator: Silvio Alexandre de Araujo
• Grantee: Gustavo Alencar Rolim
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 22/05803-3 - Cutting, packing, lot-sizing, scheduling, routing and location problems and their integration in industrial and logistics settings, AP.TEM

Abstract

This project aims to investigate the integrated cutting stock and production scheduling problem, an optimization problem that simultaneously considers decisions related to cutting stock materials, with the goal of minimizing waste, and production scheduling, which involves the temporal allocation of tasks to available resources. The objective is to capture the interdependence between these decisions, enabling material savings and reducing production costs. Given that variants of this integrated problem are classified as NP-hard, the investigation will be conducted in two stages: first, exact methods based on more efficient arc-flow formulations will be proposed. After a theoretical and empirical analysis of these formulations' performance, the second stage will focus on developing metaheuristics to obtain high-quality solutions with reduced computational cost. The use of metaheuristics can be performed either independently or in a hybrid manner alongside the proposed formulations.