This app tries to find an optimal arrangement of rectangular sheets (or tiles) of different sizes and thicknesses on a predefined support structure on the condition that the sheets can only be mounted on the beams. The sheets can be cut and/or flipped. This is sort of a 2D cutting stock problem.
The support structure usually consists of several parallel beams (preferably they are oriented vertically w.r.t. screen coordinates convention, i.e. dy > dx). The walls defined for the structure are not used during the optimization process, they are merely exported to the final DXF drawings and images for convinience.
Optimization method: genetic algorithm.
Sheet placement (or tiling) algorithm is fairly basic:
- Read the stock from a CSV file, sheet index == row
- Generate a random string of bits, each bit corresponds to the orientation of each sheet (1 = vertical, 0 = horizontal, in screen coords). If current orientation of the sheet (as read from file) doesn't match bit value, sides of the sheet's rectangle will be swapped.
- Generate a random permutation of sheet indexes
- Place the sheets onto the support beams according to the generated permutation
- Placement starts at (0, 0)
- Placement is performed column-wise, each column gets filled from top to bottom, columns are created from left to right (screen coordinates)
- Left boundaries are formed by right sides of the sheets (they are not straight, apart from the first column)
- Each sheet is intesected with all of the beams, the union rectangle of the resulting intersections defines how the sheet should be cut
- Save 3 sheets: positioned version of the original sheet ("assessed"), cut and positioned version of it ("cut") and its largest child
- Assess the placement (calculate fitness) using formula:
F = [Covered Area] / [Total Support Area] - [Total Children Area] / [Total Sheet Area] + [Joint Factor Weight = 0.1] [Number of Joints of Sheets of Equal Thicknesses] / [Total Number of Joints] - Combine the index string and the bit string into a single compound chromosome (with different operators, index string is permuted, whereas bit string is mainly mutated, and crossover between two strings is not allowed)
- Perform genetic algorithm operations on this chromosome
- Repeat untill satisfactory fitness is achieved or until step limit is reached
- Cycle through N random seeds (sometimes a really bad seed leads to a non-converging genetic algorithm) if this option is specified
Results are saved as 4 PNG images (scaled to 2K resolution), a DXF drawing, and 2 text files. All the result correspond to the best chromosome (and not the last one).
The contents include:
- An image of overlapped (not yet cut) sheets overlayed on the beams and walls
- An image of cut sheets overlayed on the beams and walls
- An image of children sheets overlayed on the beams and walls
- An image of the support structure (as loaded from the CSV file)
- DXF includes 4 layers (overlapped, cut, children, support), each sheet is tagged and grouped with its tag
- Text file "order" includes chromosome contents, best fitness and covered area
- Text file "evolution" contains fitness evolution in case you'd like to plot it
Additional features: RectpackSharp interface (legacy).
Input CSV files: look inside the project folder.
CLI arguments: bare minimum is -b "beams.csv" -s "sheets.csv", you can run it without any arguments to see help
Output: https://imgur.com/a/Nt7OMEQ
This project wouldn't have been possible without the following awesome packages:
- https://github.com/commandlineparser/commandline
- https://joshclose.github.io/CsvHelper/
- https://github.com/giacomelli/GeneticSharp
- https://github.com/haplokuon/netDxf
- https://github.com/ThomasMiz/RectpackSharp (though now it's a legacy inside this project)
- https://github.com/SixLabors/ImageSharp (+ currently beta package ImageSharp.Drawing)