30 July, 2019Lantek, a multinational pioneer in the digital transformation of the sheet metal and metal industrial sector, has signed a collaboration agreement with the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM).
This international research center in the field of Applied Mathematics was promoted by the Basque Government, the University of the Basque Country and Ikerbasque in 2008, and also has the support of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and Innobasque. BCAM currently has a workforce of more than 90 researchers working in various areas; from data science to mathematical modeling.
The agreement reached by both organizations focuses on achieving new applied mathematical models and algorithms that allow the metal deformation industry to achieve new levels of efficiency in calculations. The difficulty of the projects in the industry has increased, needing to respond to a greater number of situations with greater complexity for the calculation of machining and in the optimization of material consumption to achieve maximum efficiency of the machines.
As a starting point, they intend to explore new ways to undertake the nesting of pieces. In the industrial world, the nesting process aims to make the most of the material, configuring and placing the pieces to be cut optimally on the sheet to avoid wasting material and optimize the cutting time of the machine.
The researchers of the BCAM Computational Mathematics group have set the following objectives from the beginning:
• Design an efficient algorithm for the problem of nesting 2D metal parts.
• Design discrete matching measures based on the matching of local shapes.
• Improve the current implementation that uses the representation of areas (pixels) through boundary representations.
• Develop software that allows both accelerating the calculations and optimizing the use of the material.
The methods used so far focus on improving the geometric representation of objects and optimizing the search for local solutions between vertices of different pieces.
As explained by Michael Barton, the researcher who has led the project in BCAM, from a mathematical and computational point of view, the challenge of collaboration is to obtain a very precise solution keeping the rasterization size to a minimum to speed up the algorithm and avoid times of excessive computing.
This agreement with BCAM therefore opens the possibility of facing the improvement in the nesting of sheet metal parts from new and innovative approaches that can lead to very significant advances and contribute to the efficiency of the sheet metal industry.
