Packing Subsets of 3D Parts for Layered Manufacturing

The efficiency of layered manufacturing processes, the dominant form of rapid prototyping (RP), can be dramatically improved by building multiple, arbitrarily shaped, three-dimensional (3D) parts simultaneously in the available working volume. Given a large set of parts waiting to be manufactured, the goal is to arrange a subset of the parts to effectively use the available working volume. Generating good solutions for this problem is difficult, since the number of possible subsets grows exponentially, and since it is very computationally expensive to evaluate potential packing arrangements. This paper documents a comprehensive solution to this problem, based on a hybrid heuristic-optimization algorithm and an object simplification technique to reduce computation times. The optimization algorithm combines a heuristic to select the ordering of the parts being packed, and a simulated annealing algorithm to optimize the position of each part. The successful placement of individual parts relies on a unique metric that was developed to compare different packing arrangements of the same parts. Test cases based on real-world problems demonstrate the effectiveness of the overall approach.

[1]  C. K. Chua,et al.  Constraint‐based spatial representation technique for the container packing problem , 1998 .

[2]  Greg Turk,et al.  Re-tiling polygonal surfaces , 1992, SIGGRAPH.

[3]  I. Ikonen,et al.  A genetic algorithm for optimal object packing in a selective laser sintering rapid prototyping machine , 1997 .

[4]  Lawrence Davis,et al.  Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing , 1987 .

[5]  George K. Knopf,et al.  A moment based metric for 2-D and 3-D packing , 2000, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[6]  Dinesh Manocha,et al.  OBBTree: a hierarchical structure for rapid interference detection , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[7]  William E. Lorensen,et al.  Decimation of triangle meshes , 1992, SIGGRAPH.

[8]  C. D. Gelatt,et al.  Optimization by Simulated Annealing , 1983, Science.

[9]  Arie E. Kaufman,et al.  Voxel based object simplification , 1995, Proceedings Visualization '95.

[10]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical recipes in C , 2002 .

[11]  Judy M. Vance,et al.  Mesh Reduction Using an Angle Criterion Approach , 1996 .

[12]  Kin Keung Lai,et al.  Effective methods for a container packing operation , 1997 .

[13]  Hanan Samet,et al.  The Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures , 1989 .

[14]  Jean-Claude Léon,et al.  Static polyhedron simplification using error measurements , 1997, Comput. Aided Des..

[15]  Simon Szykman,et al.  Constrained Three-Dimensional Component Layout Using Simulated Annealing , 1997 .

[16]  George K. Knopf,et al.  Serial packing of arbitrary 3D objects for optimizing layered manufacturing , 1998, Other Conferences.

[17]  Jonathan Cagan,et al.  A Simulated Annealing-Based Approach to Three-Dimensional Component Packing , 1995 .

[18]  Dinesh Manocha,et al.  Spherical shell: a higher order bounding volume for fast proximity queries , 1998 .

[19]  Jonathan Cagan,et al.  A simulated annealing-based algorithm using hierarchical models for general three-dimensional component layout , 1998, Comput. Aided Des..

[20]  Tony DeRose,et al.  Mesh optimization , 1993, SIGGRAPH.