Nesting maximum amount of shapes on a surface

Question

In industry, there is often a problem where you need to calculate the most efficient use of material, be it fabric, wood, metal etc. So the starting point is X amount of shapes of given dimensions, made out of polygons and/or curved lines, and target is another polygon of given dimensions.

I assume many of the current CAM suites implement this, but having no experience using them or of their internals, what kind of computational algorithm is used to find the most efficient use of space? Can someone point me to a book or other reference that discusses this topic?

Answer 1

After Andrew in his answer pointed me to the right direction and named the problem for me, I decided to dump my research results here in a separate answer.

This is indeed a packing problem, and to be more precise, it is a nesting problem. The problem is mathematically NP-hard, and thus the algorithms currently in use are heuristic approaches. There does not seem to be any solutions that would solve the problem in linear time, except for trivial problem sets. Solving complex problems takes from minutes to hours with current hardware, if you want to achieve a solution with good material utilization. There are tens of commercial software solutions that offer nesting of shapes, but I was not able to locate any open source solutions, so there are no real examples where one could see the algorithms actually implemented.

Excellent description of the nesting and strip nesting problem with historical solutions can be found in a paper written by Benny Kjær Nielsen of University of Copenhagen (Nielsen).

General approach seems to be to mix and use multiple known algorithms in order to find the best nesting solution. These algorithms include (Guided / Iterated) Local Search, Fast Neighborhood Search that is based on No-Fit Polygon, and Jostling Heuristics. I found a great paper on this subject with pictures of how the algorithms work. It also had benchmarks of the different software implementations so far. This paper was presented at the International Symposium on Scheduling 2006 by S. Umetani et al (Umetani).

A relatively new and possibly the best approach to date is based on Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (HGA), a hybrid consisting of simulated annealing and genetic algorithm that has been described by Wu Qingming et al of Wuhan University (Quanming). They have implemented this by using Visual Studio, SQL database and genetic algorithm optimization toolbox (GAOT) in MatLab.