The goal of this project was to solve a real business problem in the field of Industrial Engineering. In times of high material prices and poor material availability, it is very important to keep waste as low as possible. The use of suitable profile lengths plays a major role in the metalworking industry. For this reason, extruded profiles are stored in different lengths in order to select the version with the least waste for the specific order. The waste is created by cutting it down to the required level.
One approach to calculate the fitting profile lengths is to analyze data from previous orders and calculate which lengths would have resulted in the least amount of material being used. An increase in the number of lengths stored leads to an ever-increasing reduction in scrap. However, as the number of combinations increases, it becomes more and more difficult to calculate the optimum. Automated algorithms come into play at this point. Here I would like to introduce a simple solution.
The procedure is described in the attached notebook optimize_profile_lengths.ipynb.
