A Scheduling Method With Considering Nesting for Sheet Metal Processing

In sheet metal processing, several parts are cut from one sheet metal by punching process. Before punching process, layout of parts is decided by the nesting. If the parts are arranged as compactly as possible into one sheet metal, the waste of raw materials can be reduced. Therefore, the nesting is essential for optimizing the layout of parts. However, if the nesting is executed without considering the following manufacturing processes, there cause various inefficiencies all over the processes. Therefore, the nesting and the scheduling should be considered simultaneously for the efficient manufacturing. With this point of view, in this study, we propose an integrated method in terms of scheduling and nesting. Moreover, we verified the effectiveness of the proposed method through some computational experiments.