Heuristic based approach for short term production planning in highly automated customer oriented pallet production

Wooden pallets are commonly used as load carriers in many industrial and logistic applications. This article investigates and formalizes the production planning for a highly automated but customized pallet production and provides a solution approach. For completing a specific pallet, the required boards must be cut and stacked in advance to meet the demand at the assembly line. The arising planning problem for producing the required boards consists of both a cutting stock and a constraining open stack problem. Further, both the changeover of raw material at the cutting process and the number of fully automated internal storages, for stacked boards, are restricted. The proposed solution heuristic aims at minimizing the cutting waste. Additionally, feasibility with regard to the buffers is tested using discrete event simulation. Different approaches to generate, select and sequence the cutting patterns are investigated.