FAFNER-accelerating nesting problems with FPGAs

The nesting problem consists of defining the cutting plan of a piece of raw material in smaller irregular shapes, and has applications in the apparel and footwear industries. Due to its NP-hard nature, the optimal solution can only be guaranteed by exhaustively trying all possible solutions and choosing the best one. Because this is impractical in real-life industrial problems, automatic approaches are based on optimization meta-heuristics that search for sub-optimal but good enough solutions. These optimization techniques rely on the construction and evaluation of several solutions, thus requiring heavy geometric manipulation of the irregular polygons that constitute the problem data. Efficient processing of this geometric information is thus necessary to make effective fully automatic approaches to nesting problems in industrial environments. This paper describes FAFNER, an FPGA-based custom computing machine that is used to accelerate the geometric operations, that are in the core of heuristic solutions to the nesting problem. The system is used as an auxiliary processor attached to a low cost personal computer, and combines a custom programmable processor with an array of custom circuits for the processing of irregular polygons