2D nesting

[staticbob]

Guys,

Anybody out there have any experience of 2D nesting solutions or any algorithims that may help?

Quick summary...

I have an oven for curing composite panels.

The oven has 2 shelves say 2meters squared each.

The composite panels need to be laid on the oven shelves, edges touching, ideally filling a shelf.

The composite panels are all rectangle shapes, ranging from 15cm x 50cm upto 2m x 1m, and all variants inbetween.

The panels become available to the oven in a different order each process run, so I want to develop a tool that tells me the best way to nest these for oven capacity, then I will change the process order that they come in.

Could anybody advise what type of solution I could develop for this? I'm not sure the best way to go about this. Loops within loops within loops just storing the shelf space in memory at runtime and testing to see if the next panel fits... or whether to code against excel/visio or something like that where I can use shapes....

Any starters for 10 please?

Thanks
Bob

[jemidiah]

Unfortunately your problem is "hard". There looks to be quite a bit of published material on it--for instance, see this article. You might try searching for "rectangular packing problem" or variants on that. Various proposed solutions tend to get evaluated, so people have definitely coded it before. Perhaps you'll be able to find someone else's code and simply run it. I suppose if you're desperate, unable to find code online, unwilling to implement a published solution, and it's a really big cost savings to you, you could get into contact with paper authors and ask for their code. It sounds like you really only need to run your specific incarnation of this problem through someone else's solver, which might be even easier.

Sorry I can't be more specific.