Abstract
Efficient geometric algorithms are given for optimization problems arising in layered manufacturing, where a 3D object is built by slicing its CAD model into layers and manufacturing the layers successively. The problems considered include minimizing the stair-step error on the surfaces of the manufactured object under various formulations, minimizing the volume of the so-called support structures used, and minimizing the contact area between the supports and the manufactured object - all of which are factors that affect the speed and accuracy of the process. The stair-step minimization algorithm is valid for any polyhedron, while the support minimization algorithms are applicable only to convex polyhedra. The techniques used to obtain these results include construction and searching of certain arrangements on the sphere, 3D convex hulls, halfplane range searching, and constrained optimization.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 219-239 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 3-4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 1999 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:I Portions of this work appear in preliminary form in [17]. The results in this paper, and in a companion paper [18], extend upon and improve the results in [17]. ∗Corresponding author. E-mail: michiel@isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de 1E-mail: jayanth_majhi@mentorg.com. This work was done while the author was at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Research supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid of Research from the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota and by NSF grant CCR-9712226. 2 E-mail: janardan@cs.umn.edu. Research supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid of Research from the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota and by NSF grant CCR-9712226. 3Part of this work was done while the author was at the Department of Computer Science, King’s College, London, UK. 4E-mail: pgupta@delsoft.com. Part of this work was done while the author was at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany, and at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
Keywords
- Computational geometry
- Layered manufacturing
- Optimization
