A Divide-conquer Heuristic Search Algorithm for Cutting Surplus Steel Plates of Steel and Iron Companies

The cutting pattern problem of the surplus steel plates (SPCP problem) is difficult to solve. In this paper, a divide-conquer heuristic search approach (DHSA) is proposed for SPCP. Firstly, the related knowledge is extracted and used in transforming the SPCP problem into the special restricted rectangle packing problem (S2RP problem) for each group of surplus(es) and orders. Afterward, feasible candidate cutting schemes can be obtained through an exhaustive search based on the knowledge and proposed divide-conquer heuristic strategy for the S2RP problem. And the optimal one having passed through quality-monitoring can be quickly found from the sorted candidate schemes. Theoretical analysis and numerical experiments show that the proposed DHSA algorithm is superior to existing approaches, especially the MES-based human-computer interactive approach in performance for the SPCP problem.