An and—or-graph approach for two-dimensional cutting problems

Abstract The problem of generating guillotine cutting patterns for a rectangular plate is studied and a type of structure is proposed for representing the solution of the problem, called and-or graph , which is commonly used in the Artificial Intelligence environment. To search the graph we combined two classical strategies: depth-first and hill-climbing . Further, some heuristics are considered and computational results are presented, relating their performance on examples from both literature as well as randomly generated.