Hi am working for for a manufacturing company whose operation works in this manner
We get rolls of a material in a particular size our supplier lets say 8000 meteres per roll. Then we get orders from different customers of smaller sizes such as 2000 metres, 3000 metres etc. I am trying to develop a software for this and was wondering if there is any mathematical technique in which they simply input their current roll size and the different orders we have at the moment it can generate the best way to cut the different rolls so as to minimize the wastage.
For example at a particular point in time we may have the following orders 2 pieces of 3000 metres 2 pieces of 4000 metres 6 pieces of 1500 metres
Then all we should have to input is the above orders alongwith the roll size our supplier provides us for this example we assume its is 8000 metres.
Then the software should generate output such as Roll 1 - Two pieces of 4000 metres Roll Wasted 0 Roll 2 -Two pieces of 3000 metres and 1 piece of 1500 (Roll Wasted 500) Roll 3 - Five pieces of 15000 (Roll Wasted 500)
The script should be optimized as the above example is quite small. Typically we will have orders for about 200 pieces at a time
I know we can do this through brute force trying each combination. But are there any other sorting algorithms and techniques which can help in this case reducing the load on the computer.Currently we do this manually and it takes day for our staf