cs5401-stock-cutting-visualizer

A visualizer for the stock cutting problem

Getting Started

There's a few quick requirements that will need to be filled to use this tool

Requirements

This visualizer uses Python and one of its popular libraries, matplotlib. In order for it to function, your machine will need the following:

• >= Python 3.4
• >= matplotlib 1.5.3

How to use it

The EA project requires you to read in from an input file (hereafter referred to as the shape file) and to generate a solution file (hereafter referred to as the placement file). Once you have a working EA and have produced some solution files (and their required amount of material), you may simply run the visualizer like so:

python3 visualizer.py -s shapes.txt -p placement.txt

In the above example, 10 is the minimum amount of material required by the solution.

NOTE: The visualizer assumes that rotations will be done in the clockwise direction, i.e. a rotation of 1 will rotate 90 degrees clockwise and a rotation of 3 will rotate 90 degrees anti-clockwise.

Optional Arguments

The following options may make it easier to see what's going on:

• -n: Turn on shape ids. This will label each shape in the order they were received to make it clear which shape came from which line of the input file
• -g: Turn on gridlines. This option adds a grid that makes it much easier to see where each shape is located.
  NOTE: This option is buggy for very small inputs
• -l [num]: Give the sheet a starting length. This is not required, but it may speed up operation, especially if you know that your sheet is going to be very large

Example

Example files and outputs are found in the examples directory.
Given shapes.txt:

5 2
R1 D1
D1 L4 R1 U3 R3

and your solution file placement.txt:

3,2,1
4,1,0

with an optimal solution of 5, and shape ids turned on the visualizer will produce this image:

And here is a snippet from a much larger sheet:

TODO

• Fix gridlines near the outside boundaries