Here's an older computer program I hadn't seen until today: Cutlist Generator figures out how to make most efficient use of your wood based on the measurements of your pieces. Windows only, but it's free! I can't imagine it would be that hard to port to a web app... Via Core77.
Posted by Becky Stern |
Nov 17, 2008 07:00 PM
Computers, Furniture |
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If I'm not mistaken (and I might be) this is equivalent to, the box packing problem, and it is NP-complete. So, easy? No.
My suspicion is also that it only works with rectangular pieces, and so cannot do clever nesting of odd shaped pieces.
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Last spring, while designing the MDF cutting layout for my DIY CNC router project, I got frustrated and spent a week's worth of evenings researching and implementing a suitable strip packing algorithm. Here are the results:
http://mairas.net/wiki/Freecut
The cutting and packing field is one with plenty of previous research. This is an excellent meta-paper regarding the topic:
Gerhard Wäscher, Heike Haußner, and Holger Schumann. An improved typology of cutting and packing problems. European Journal of Operational Research 183:1109–1130, 2007.
If you're interested but can't get hold of the paper, email me and we'll figure out something.
Cheers,
ma.
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