Nesting Process Automation in the Footwear Industry: A Hybrid Approach to Minimize Material Waste

In any industry, maximizing the use of raw materials is essential to reduce waste and costs, which also positively impacts the environment. In footwear production, components are typically derived from cutting processes, requiring optimized systems to maximize the use of different materials, minimize waste, and accelerate production. In this context, nesting is a technique that arranges shapes within a confined space to maximize area utilization and reduce unused space. As this problem is classified as NP-Hard, only algorithmic approximations can be employed. This paper focuses on optimizing the cutting of leather parts for shoe manufacturing. Footwear parts are cut from cattle hides, which are not only irregular in shape but also vary in resistance and quality across different areas of the same piece of leather. This study proposes automated nesting methods that aim to compete with current manual approaches, which are conducted exclusively by experts with deep knowledge of the characteristics of both the pieces and the leather, making the manual process time-intensive. This research reviews current methods and introduces hybrid ones, achieving up to 38.4× acceleration and up to 10.18% increase in nested pieces over manual methods.