Improving Wood Yield Recovery in Live Sawing Using Strip-bottom-left-fill Bin-packing Heuristic

This paper presents a constructive heuristic approach to solve the live sawing optimization problem, which involves cutting rectangular boards from cylindrical logs with circular cross sections. The problem is defined as a two-dimensional strip bin-packing problem, where the objective is to orthogonally pack a given set of rectangular items into a set of strips inside a circle, while considering feasibility and technical constraints. The proposed approach uses a list of ordered rectangles and a combination of sorting, placement, and searching policies to build a feasible cutting, and presents a live sawing pattern generation that makes guillotine cuts possible for sawing machines. Our approach surpasses traditional methods, including a mathematical programming model and a state-of-the-art heuristic approach, in terms of computational effort, memory usage, and search requirements. Furthermore, it maintains superior cutting yield efficiency, as evidenced by the presented simulations and comparisons.