A two-dimensional nesting algorithm by using no-fit polygon

Nowadays, nesting problem has been encountered in many manufacturing industry. Nesting problem is given lots of layout elements and using algorithm to looking for the most suitable positions of every layout element in template to save the resource. In this paper, the two-dimensional problem is considered. The width of template is assumed to be fixed, and the heuristic and genetic algorithm is used to lessen the height. The no-fit polygon (NFP) is used to be the decode function of genetic algorithm. In the genetic algorithm, we use a combination of the height and overlap parameter considering that some combination's height is lower because of the overlap. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.