Exact Algorithms for Large-Scale Unconstrained Two and Three Staged Cutting Problems.

In this paper we propose two exact algorithms for solving both two-staged and three-staged unconstrained (un) weighted cutting problems. The two-staged problem is solved by applying a dynamic programming procedure originally developed by Gilmore and Gomory [10]. The three-staged problem is solved by using a top-down approach combined with a dynamic programming procedure. The performance of the exact algorithms are evaluated on some problem instances of the literature and other hard randomly-generated problem instances (a total of 53 problem instances). A parallel implementation is an important feature of the algorithm used for solving the three-staged version.