COMPUTER AIDED STOCK LAYOUT OF SHEET METAL PARTS

Abstract

Stock layout problem is important to many industries like sheet metal, garment, foot wear, ship building etc. Stock layout problem is nothing but allocation of parts on to the stock sheet. An efficient stock layout can reduce material waste to a minimum,. thereby reducing the product cost. In industries stock layout is carried out manually till now. This procedure becomes tedious and time consuming when the number of parts to be nested is large and in variety of shapes. Now-a-days computer aided stock layout techniques are becoming more popular because of their ability to produce better results in less time. In this thesis work two heuristics, complementary area heuristic and modified complementary area heuristic have been developed to carry out stock layout of rectangular parts. In addition to above a stock layout improvement technique based on simulated annealing has been applied to stock layout developed by proposed heuristics, resulting in considerable improvement in material utilization.