C&P Software for a cutting problem of a German wood panel manufacturer

This paper describes the solution of a real-world cutting problem of a German wood panel manufacturer. It gives an insight of the applied modern cutting technology, the resulting constraints of the cutting problem and the "soft" criteria for the user's assessment of the cutting software. Three commercial cutting programs are explicitly compared by their characteristics. Finally, a numeric comparison of the same software is carried out on the basis of 74 test instances randomly taken from the production process.