An implementation of the vectorizing-based automatic nesting software NST

Abstract

Among the processes to manufacture parts from footwear materials like upper leathers, one of the most essential processes is the cutting process for optimally arranging parts on raw footwear materials. A new nesting strategy was proposed for the 2-dimensional part layout by using a two-stage approach which can be effectively used for water jet cutting. In the initial layout stage, a SOAL(Self-Organization Assisted Layout) based on the combination of FCM (Fuzzy C-Means) and SOM(Self-Organizing Maps) were adopted. In the layout improvement stage, SA(Simulated Annealing)-based approach was adopted for a finer layout. The approach proposed in this paper saves much CPU time through a two-stage approach scheme, while other annealing-based algorithms so far reported for nesting problems are computationally expensive. The proposed nesting approach uses the stochastic process, and has a much higher possibility to obtain a global solution than the deterministic searching techniques. We developed the automatic 2-dimensional nesting software NST(ver. 1, 1) for footwear industry by implementing these proposed algorithms. The optimized automatic nesting algorithm of NST has been applied for cutting without the loss of leathers, if possible, after detecting defected areas. NST can also consider various distinctive qualities in not only natural leathers but artificial ones. Lastly, NST can reduce a required time to generating NC-code, cutting time, and waste of raw materials because it automatically performs parts arrangement, cutting paths generation and finally NC-code generation, which require a lot of efforts and time to generate them manually. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.