Abstract
In recent years, the global wood products market has become highly competitive. Due to this, sawmills seek to improve their efficiency throughout their production process. In this regard, improving sawing efficiency through improved cutting strategies is vital for preventing overproduction and waste issues. In this paper, we deal with the sawing optimization problem defined as the problem of cutting rectangular boards from cylindrical logs with circular cross sections. In particular, we consider a sawing pattern that is highly beneficial for wood manufacturing, namely cant sawing. We take into account feasibility, capacity, non-overlapping, and technical constraints of the sawing process. We first develop an exact model of this combinatorial optimization problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem.