I was searching google for something and saw the post that some one needed a piece of software in which he can take a sheet of material- and that he can maximize the cuts.
he needs to be able to enter the width and the length of the roll. Then he would enter the sizes of cuts that he would need. After all the sizes are entered, the software would tell me how to cut the material so that he can achieve maximum efficiency.
Possible???
is there some AI involved?
This is referred to as a packing problem and is an important area of research in combinatorics, a field of mathematics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_problem
Yes it is possible and done in manufacturing. The simple way to think about it is you try any combination the computer can think of and take the one that is best (brute force). Basically it pretends to make a cut and then sees what is left, makes another pretend cut and sees what is left until the material is gone and then it tries them in a different location/order.
It is an optimization problem and there are many solutions out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimization_problem A wiki link that will lead you to many hours of reading.
This is entirely possible. It's just an optimization layout problem. I can't help you code it, but it's definitely possible and I suspect strongly that there are even efficient algorithms to do it.
I would imagine this problem has already solved a long time ago, when people did the calculations rather than software. I dont know the name of the problem, but i have seen that solving the optimal way to pack circlse in a box is a well known mathematical problem.
This is indeed 2D bin packing. As for software, take a look at Drools Planner (open source, java).
