Effective Nesting of Complex Two Dimensional Shapes

Effective arrangement of two dimensional geometrical shapes (referred as 2D nesting), before to cut them out of a large sheet material, is a very important task in many industries such as sheet metal, cloth, leather, shipbuilding, aerospace, granite and paper; as it aims to the optimal utilization of the sheet material, targeting the substantial savings on the material cost. Since the requirement of two dimensional shapes to be cut may vary from the simple rectangular shapes to highly irregular shapes with a wide range of batch quantity, 2D nesting problem is mainly considered as the geometrical packing problem and several algorithms are explored towards finding the optimal solutions. This book addresses the various issues to be considered while nesting of 2D parts in two dimensional sheets and highlights different methods proposed by various researchers. Further, a generic approach is proposed in this work to handle highly complex parts by means of representing the part & sheet geometry in discrete form and then nesting them by employing heuristic and genetic algorithms. This work provides a good reference to students, researchers, as well as sheet metal manufacturers.