Blade & Waste Constraints

Blade Count

Every strip in a pattern needs its own blade position, including repeats of the same width. The optimizer never returns a pattern that needs more blades than the machine's Max Blades (or the per-run override). This is a hard constraint — it is never traded off against waste.

Double Runs

When a width is so narrow that the blade limit stops the machine from cutting enough of it in one pass, enabling Double Run lets the engine propose a two-pass plan: pass 1 cuts wider intermediate reels (and any existing orders of that intermediate width), pass 2 re-slits each intermediate reel down the middle into the final width. The proposal shows the waste of each pass against the blade-limited single-pass alternative. Accepting it creates a second, linked deckle run for pass 2.

Waste Targets

The machine's Max Waste Target and Per Pattern target are acceptance thresholds. If a straightforward Phase 1 solve clears both, that plan is used with no further work. If it doesn't, the engine runs the variance search and hands you ranked candidates — it never simply gives up because a target was missed. With both targets blank, the engine minimizes waste with no threshold and returns the single best plan.

Patterns are also held to a minimum run length (a fraction of an MT) so the plan doesn't fragment into many tiny blade setups; very small patterns are absorbed into a larger covering pattern during post-processing.

Minimum Trimming

The available deckle the optimizer fills is the machine's deckle width minus the GSM's minimum trimming. Widen the minimum trimming and every pattern has less room; the Available Deckle helper on the GSM row shows the effect per machine.

When It Can't Solve

If there is genuinely no feasible plan — for example a width wider than the available deckle, or demand that can't be met inside the blade limit even with a double run — the optimization is marked failed with a reason. Common fixes: correct the width, raise the blade override, widen a width's variance, split the run, or enable Double Run.