The strip-packing problem for a boat manufacturing firm

This paper addresses the problem of minimizing the amount of wasted space when cutting a set of rectangular pieces from a single rectangular sheet of stock material. A simulated annealing algorithm is developed and is shown to significantly outperform three existing heuristics on a set of 37 real-world data sets. In addition, a mathematical programming formulation of the problem and several theoretical lower bounds are developed and used to demonstrate that the simulated annealing solutions are within 9.5% of the optimal solution, on average.