Hybrid Scatter Search and Tabu Search for the Mother Plate Design Problem in the Iron and Steel Industry

This paper investigates the mother plate design (MPD) problem encountered in the heavy plate mill of the steel enterprise. The aim of the problem is to pack rectangular order plates (that need to be produced) into mother plates that satisfy guillotine and materials constraints. We develop a hybrid algorithm based on scatter search. Two adaptations of Finite Best Strip and Finite First Fit are developed to construct the placement of the order plates, and a simple tabu search algorithm is developed to improve the packing quality of the current packing solution. Computational experiments show that the hybrid algorithm can provide very satisfactory results in a reasonable time.