• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.8-14
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• 2012

Two dimensional nesting is a common problem in industries such as the shipbuilding, automotive, clothing, shoe-making, and furniture industries, in which various parts are cut off from stock or packed in a flat space while minimizing waste or unoccupied space. Nesting is known as an NP-complete problem, which has a solution time proportional to the superpolynomial of the input size. It becomes practically impossible to find an optimal solution using algorithmic methods as the number of shapes to nest increases. Therefore, heuristic methods are commonly used to solve nesting problems. This paper presents an expert system that uses a heuristic search method based on an evaluation function for nesting problems, in which parts and stock are represented by pixels. The system is developed in CLIPS, an expert system shell, and is applied to four different kinds of example problems to verify its applicability in practical problems.