A systematic approach in shoe last design for human feet

The main purpose of this research is to build a process to find the most suitable shoe last for making shoes for human feet. A fitness function is defined to determine the optimum shoe last. Based on reverse engineering (RE) technology, this research scanned the surface of human foot and shoe last in STL (Stereo Lithography) format. We proposed the STL feature-based slicing algorithm to automatically construct the three most important girth characteristics for human feet and shoe last. Fuzzy theory was used to analyze and build the membership functions of these three important characteristics between the shoe last and human feet. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) was applied to compare the important index and decide the weighting functions for each girth characteristic to determine the fitness function in all shoe last databases for the feet.