It might be the case that you order to print a custom-made happy birthday cart for someone before, or at least think about it and check a few websites that offer this kind of services. Now days online shopping is the main selling channel for almost every industry. You might be supersized to find out the even Domins order their special pizza boxes to printing companies online.
Online printing orders has very tight deadlines and and very low margin profits for the printing companies. Thus, efficient use of equipment and material is crucial for printing companies. This is where Operations Research can help.
In collaborative with an online printing company, we designed a fast, flexible and reliable optimization algorithm. Our algorithm decide 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).