A new approach for nesting problem using part decomposition technology

Since a large portion of the complexity of the part nesting problem stems from the overlap computation, the geometric representation is one of the most important factors to reduce the complexity of the problem. The proposed part representation method can easily handle parts and raw materials with widely varying geometrical shape by using the part decomposition technique. This considerably reduces the amount of processed data and consequently the run time of the computer. The introduced part decomposition method in the research is a computer-aided approach by using the quadtree encoding. The adopted nesting routine is a global layout process which consists of two states: the initial layout, where a reasonably fine part layout is obtained by the SOAL (self-organization assisted layout) algorithm, and the layout improvement, where the final layout is obtained by the SA (simulated annealing) algorithm.