Choice of Method for General One-Dimensional Cutting Stock Problem

Problems in operations research are often NP complete and optimal solution for larger problems cannot be obtained, therefore heuristic methods have to be used. The boundary between the size of the problem that can be solved optimally and those where heuristic methods should be used is not always clear. To solve this problem we propose a method based on decision trees. The method can be also used to determine which variables have the largest influence on complexity of the problem. The proposed method was tested on General One-Dimensional Cutting Stock Problem. The result is reduced trim loss. Key-Words: cutting stock problem, decision trees, optimization, linear programming, heuristic methods, exact method