Profili

Overview

Profili is a web application designed to help companies reduce industrial waste by providing optimal pipe cutting instructions. The user inputs the dimensions of the pipes and the required cuts, and Profili outputs the most efficient cutting plan, minimising waste and maximising material usage*. The application has been successfully deployed at ElektroLab, where it has been in use for over a year.

The Solution

This is achieved by using the column generation algorithm, an optimisation technique used to solve the cutting stock problem by dynamically generating cutting patterns rather than evaluating all exponentially many possibilities at once. This was all packaged into a frontend that adhered to the stakeholders' requirements and constraints using Django and JavaScript.

Additional Details

* Cutting stock problem is an NP-hard problem, so while this solution is not exactly optimal, it is a very good approximation that can be computed in a reasonable time frame for real-world use cases.

Current goal: clean up the codebase, implement proper packaging and deployment and publish it on GitHub.