PERFORMANCE TESTING OF RECTANGULAR PARTS-NESTING HEURISTICS

A comparison is made of the performance of a set of rectangular layout heuristics on the basis of their packing densities and time performance, with a view to increase their applicability in manufacturing situations. Among the techniques is a class of heuristics introduced by the authors in an earlier work. The experimental comparison is made over two attributes defined for the bill of materials; the area and the aspect ratio distributions of the pieces. In addition, some of the heuristics considered permit limited human intervention. The study shows that the two attributes play a significant part in determining the performance of a heuristic.