Author(s)

Dongmok Sheen¹, Yoonho Seo^2*

¹School of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering, University of Ulsan, Ulsan, Korea.
²School of Industrial Management Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea.

Nesting is a common problem in industries such as shipbuilding, auto-maker, clothing, shoe-making, and furniture, in which various parts are cut off from a stock or stocks while minimizing the wastes or maximizing the utilization of the stock. Berth allocation at seaside is also considered one form of two dimensional nesting problems, in which a ship is assigned a location for service during a certain time slot. This paper presents an expert system using a heuristic search method for nesting problems. The parts and stocks are represented by pixels with which utility function is used to evaluate current state in search tree. The system is developed in CLIPS, an expert system shell and applied to various example problems with different constraints and to a berth allocation example to illustrate its applicability under different conditions.

Nesting, Berth Allocation, Heuristic Search, CLIPS

Sheen, D. and Seo, Y. (2017) Nesting and Berth Allocation by an Expert System Using Heuristic Search. Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 10, 311-323. doi: 10.4236/jsea.2017.104018.