A practical packing strategy for the automated handling of irregular shapes

This paper considers two design strategies: 1) maximising the use of the context information available from a given task, by the application of a systems engineering approach to the packing problem, and 2) the development of an adaptive packing strategy for random shapes, using morphological and heuristic techniques. The characteristics required in a flexible packing system are summarised. Such a system will consist of two main components. The first will provide a means of manipulating the shape and scene image at a geometric level. The second component will consist of a rule based geometric reasoning unit capable of deciding the ordering and orientation of the shapes to be packed. The heuristic component must also be capable of dealing with the system issues arising from a specific application demand