Abstract
Every day different companies in industry have to solve many optimization problems. One of them is cutting out of linear materials, like steel or aluminum profiles, steel or wood beams and so on. It is so called cutting stocks problem (CSP). It is well known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. The accurate and fast cutting out is very important element from the working process. The aim in CSP is to cut items from stocks of certain length, minimizing the total number of stocks (waste). The computational time increases exponentially when the number of items increase. Finding the optimal solution for large-sized problems for a reasonable time is impossible. Therefore, exact algorithms and traditional numerical methods can be apply of only on very small problems. Mostly appropriate methods for this kind of problems are methods based on stochastic search or so called metaheuristic methods. We propose a variant of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm to solve linear cutting stocks problem.