High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The cutting-stock problem is an optimization problem, or more specifically, an integer linear programming problem. It arises from many applications in industry. Imagine that you work in a paper mill and you have a number of rolls of paper of fixed width waiting to be cut, yet different customers want different numbers of rolls of various-sized widths. How are you going to cut the rolls so that you minimize the waste (amount of left-overs)?