OPTIMAL CUTTING FABRIC

Problem of optimal cutting pieces of cloth on the pattern given shape has long existed. Optimality means minimizing of cloth's wastes abide by proportion to the amount of patterns of different styles.

Most often, the problem is solved by standard mathematical optimization techniques. However, in this case using the standard methods was impossible, because both the original piece of cloth, and the required pattern have arbitrary shape with rounded sides, not rectangular. Because of it was chosen heuristic method that doesn't have a specific mathematical basis. The method is completely created by the author of this program. Of course, to simplify all rounded forms have been replaced by broken lines. It didn't leaded to large errors in the calculations, but significantly simplified the algorithmization.

The program was developed on the early personal computers with a frequency of no more than 8 MHz (350 times less than it is now), the first versions worked for several hours. Of course, it is not allowed to make the program very difficult, but it gave an incentive to seek effective optimization algorithms. As a result, the computation time was reduced to 10-40 minutes. On modern computers the computation time is actually negligible.

Unfortunately, work on this program was not brought to completion. The author was also forced to write the module of information's output and was distracted from main work. However, when creating output were resolved interesting practical problems of constructing arbitrary figures. Keep in mind that the program was written in MS-DOS environment in the absence of any graphic libraries.

At this time, the program exists in its original form like 20 years ago, but if necessary (the presence of a particular order), it can be revived and improved in accordance with the current technical capabilities. On this page you can see an example of cutting.