The productivity of laser cutting machines can be significantly improved by use of micro-computer based CAD/CAM systems. Furthermore, the part nesting and torch path planning are crucial steps in the development of CAD/CAM system for laser cutting process. In this research, three main subjects are studied for constructing an integrated CAD/CAM system in the 2D laser cutting process.
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.
Nesting of two-dimensional part on a given raw material has applications in a number of industries. It is a common problem often faced by designers in the shipbuilding, garment makng, blanking die design, glass and wood industries. This research presents a new two-stage layout approach for nesting two-dimensional part by using the self-organization assisted layout(SOAL) and simulated annealing(SA). The proposed nesting approach consists of two stages: initial layout stage and layout improvement stage. This heuristic algorithm generates a good initial layout by using the SOAL and then improves the layout by using the SA. The SOAL process is based on the learning algorithm of the neural networks proposed by Kohonen, called the self-organization, and uses the fuzzy membership values from the fuzzy c-means(FCM) as the learning rates. The SA process is based on the probabilistic state transition, which makes transitions out of a local minimum possible. Because of this, SA is introduced to find a near-optimal layout without greatly destroying the initial layout. Therefore, the layout solution was obtained from the combi...