Search for the Intersection Polygon of any Two Polygons: Application to the Garment Industry

Abstract

One of the biggest problems usually encountered by the clothes manufacturer consists of placing various pattern parts on a rectangular area in such a way that the waste of material between the pieces is minimized.To bring some automated help in this field, computer programs need first to handle the complicated contours of the pieces. One needs not only to check the overlap of two contiguous patterns, but also to compute their precise area of intersection, allowing in this way the use of some kind of combinatorial optimization.In a wider context, it is possible to design a general purpose algorithm, able to build the complete structure representing the intersection of two polygons. It is remarkable that the same algorithm can also be used, with only a few modifications, to compute the union and the difference of any two polygons.