An approach for printing the maximum possible number of images
Fecha
2017-01-01
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Editor
Institute of Industrial Engineers
Resumen
This paper considers a real life application of a printing process in a lithographic company that manufactures food packaging bags. The focus area of this problem is to print a variety of 2D images of bags on a surface area for maximum press layouts, with a constraint that the orientation of all bags is fixed and they should be placed parallel to the edges of the impression material. The problem under study is NP-hard and is an extension of the classical knapsack problem. An algorithm to maximize the number of rectangular images of bags that can be placed within the printing material is proposed. The results were compared with a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) metaheuristic. Several numerical experiments show that our procedure outperforms the PSO algorithm and improves the lithography's performance.