To optimize the cutting step during manufacturing, five main topics are usually considered important: material waste, consumables and energy consumption, cutting time and process automation.
Automatic nesting optimization is the first critical step to reduce material waste. The key here is to take all industrial constraints into account. For instance: making room for lead-in/lead-out, ensuring cutting quality by keeping the smallest possible gap between cut parts, reusing offcuts from previous cutting plans, etc. This is where PowerNest2 excels: Alma’s software component for automatic nesting rapidly finds the best cutting plans for each order.
But common line cutting goes far beyond that. It brings opportunities inaccessible to traditional nesting optimizers. By reducing the standard gap between parts to the tool kerf, the material yield is significantly improved. Additionally, cutting time, consumables and energy use are drastically reduced since a single pass is needed to cut a common line vs. two in the standard case. To stay competitive, it becomes mandatory to take full advantage of common line cutting.
Common line cutting is far more complex than simple nesting: making room for lead-in and lead-out can be tricky; the skeleton may become unstable; and finding good common cut line between complex non-rectangle parts can be difficult… PowerNest is designed to solve all these challenges, thanks to the input collected from many different industries. PowerNest2 will optimize the cutting step during manufacturing by automatically finding cutting plans with unmatched yield, by cleverly using common line cutting, keeping in mind all domain-specific constraints.
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November 2016