Online Printing Production Scheduling
Applying optimization to handle tight deadlines in online printing
It might be the case that you order to print a custom-made happy birthday card for someone before, or at least think about it and check a few websites that offer this kind of services. Nowadays online shopping is the main selling channel for almost every industry. You might be surprised to find out that even Domino's orders their special pizza boxes to printing companies online.
Online printing orders have very tight deadlines and very low profit margins for the printing companies. Thus, efficient use of equipment and material is crucial for printing companies. This is where Operations Research can help.
In collaboration with an online printing company, we designed a fast, flexible, and reliable optimization algorithm. Our algorithm decides on the printing plate layout, number of copies necessary from each plate, and the printing date of the plate. A simple implementation of the algorithm in Python can be found in the following GitHub repository (github.com/mahdims/2D-Bin-packing).