Approach used in the plant
Optimization of metal utilization for aluminum extrusion operations

In the plant under consideration, the company had established a manual approach to reducing the amount of scrap resulting from cutting. When the planner receives orders from the marketing department, he begins by grouping together those with close delivery dates. In these groups, orders of the same alloy and diameter are grouped together in the same extrusion, to minimize changes of extrusion table and alloy in the furnaces. In the end, the planner tries to combine lengths manually to minimize scrap. To illustrate the complexity of the problem, we present the following example.