Developing a Maximum Inscribed Rectangle Heuristic to Satisfy Rush Orders for Heavy Plate Steel

Steel service centers receive rush orders that must be fulfilled on very short notice. Each order only consumes a portion of one steel plate, so plate selection and job placement are the critical factors that affect the service center’s primary performance metric: plate yield. In conjunction with a steel service center, Artco Steel, we model this problem as a two-dimensional online bin-packing algorithm. Unique in the online bin-packing literature, we calculate the maximum inscribed rectangle (MIR) before and after job placement as the basis for heuristics that assign each job to a plate and position the job on the plate. Our work is the first paper to extend the online two-dimensional bin-packing problem to incorporate scrap, rectangular bin sizes, and a finite number of bins. The MIR procedure significantly outperformed Artco’s existing practice of giving priority to the most recently used plate, and the heuristic’s straightforward nature allowed easy adoption in 2010.