Coil Cut Optimizer (CCO)

Optimization software for Steel Service Centers

Coil Cut Optimizer (CCO) is an Optimization software application for Steel Service Centers, which helps human programmers generate Optimized Cutting Patterns for Slitting and Cut-To-Length machines, minimizing Trim-Loss (Scrap) and Set-up time.

The generation of optimized Cutting Pattern has always been a very difficult task, which is usually owned by only one very experienced human planner in each company. In the Steel Industry, in addition to a normal 2-dimension nesting problem, the Cutting Pattern also has to respect a number of heterogeneous constrains. These constrains range from Customer-Order requirements (like Minimum/Maximum External Diameter of cut Strip, Minimum/Maximum weight for a single strip) to Machine constraints (like Max Number of knives to be used, minimum width for a strip). This makes the Steel Service Company very dependent on one single expert. CCO software is generating a number of optimized Cutting Patterns in a fraction of second, respecting all kinds of constraints, helping also a non-expert human planner to choose the best Cutting Program in each context.

The Optimization algorithm used in CCO has received the IAAI award from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence as best Industrial Application of Artificial Intelligence: E.Bertolotti, E.Castaldo, G.Giannone "Near Optimal Objects Packing Through Dimensional Unfolding", in "Proceedings of the Eight Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence" (pg. 1433-1442); The MIT Press.

CCO has been developed in Common LISP because of the powerful List processing and easy interactive development, Gino Giannone CEO of Fast-Square says: "Only when we started to use the Allegro CL environment by Franz Inc. with Allegro Common Graphics and Allegro ODBC, we found a powerful developing environment that helped us generate an application with no memory limitation and very high performance, even with big data-sets."

What distinguishes CCO from other software for Steel Service Centers is the high performance in generating hundreds of Optimized Cutting Patterns in a fraction of seconds compared to tens of seconds or minutes of execution time by other software based on Operational Research algorithms written in other developing environments.

Future Development

CCO is already used by several Steel Service Centers in Europe. In 2016 Fast-Square plans to start selling the software also in USA, either directly or with the support of local software integrator companies. The Allegro CL environment is easing the development of specific requirements of the US market.

For more information about Fast-Square and Coil Cut Optimizer, please contact: Gino Giannone at gino.giannone@fast-square.net or visit www.fast-square.net.