Mutation Ant Colony Algorithms of Constrained Two-dimensional Guillotine Cutting Problems

The two-dimensional cutting problem plays an important role in many goods production processes. The two-dimensional cutting problem addressed in this paper consists of cutting a large rectangular plate into a number of stripes which are then cut to obtain ordered smaller rectangles. Its objective is to maximize the total area used and the numbers of ordered pieces are limited to specified numbers. To obtain ant colony algorithm for this problem, an order-cutting method is given and solving this problem is translated to searching an optimal machining order by order-cutting method. Then an ant colony algorithm and its improving algorithm with mutation operator and reproduction in-break operator are given to searching an optimal machining order. Computational results are presented for some large randomly generated problems