Heuristic approaches to large-scale periodic packing of irregular shapes on a rectangular sheet

The nesting problem is a two-dimensional cutting and packing problem where the small pieces to cut have irregular shapes. A particular case of the nesting problem occurs when congruent copies of one single shape have to fill, as much as possible, a limited sheet. Traditional approaches to the nestin...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: M. Teresa Costa (author)
Other Authors: A. Miguel Gomes (author), José F. Oliveira (author)
Format: article
Language:eng
Published: 2009
Subjects:
Online Access:https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/91984
Country:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorio-aberto.up.pt:10216/91984
Description
Summary:The nesting problem is a two-dimensional cutting and packing problem where the small pieces to cut have irregular shapes. A particular case of the nesting problem occurs when congruent copies of one single shape have to fill, as much as possible, a limited sheet. Traditional approaches to the nesting problem have difficulty to tackle with high number of pieces to place. Additionally, if the orientation of the given shape is not a constraint, the general nesting approaches are not particularly successful. This problem arises in practice in several industrial contexts such as footwear, metalware and furniture. A possible approach is the periodic placement of the shapes, in a lattice way. In this paper, we propose three heuristic approaches to solve this particular case of nesting problems. Experimental results are-compared with published results in literature and additional results obtained from new instances are also provided.