Portfolio of Solving Strategies in CEGAR-based Object Packing and Scheduling for Sequential 3D Printing

Abstract

Computing power that used to be available only in supercomputers decades ago especially their parallelism is currently available in standard personal computer CPUs even in CPUs for mobile telephones. We show how to effectively utilize the computing power of modern multi-core personal computer CPU to solve the complex combinatorial problem of object arrangement and scheduling for sequential 3D printing. We achieved this by parallelizing the existing CEGAR-SEQ algorithm that solves the sequential object arrangement and scheduling by expressing it as a linear arithmetic formula which is then solved by a technique inspired by counterexample guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR). The original CEGAR-SEQ algorithm uses an object arrangement strategy that places objects towards the center of the printing plate. We propose alternative object arrangement strategies such as placing objects towards a corner of the printing plate and scheduling objects according to their height. Our parallelization is done at the high-level where we execute the CEGAR-SEQ algorithm in parallel with a portfolio of object arrangement strategies, an algorithm is called Porfolio-CEGAR-SEQ. Our experimental evaluation indicates that Porfolio-CEGAR-SEQ outperforms the original CEGAR-SEQ. When a batch of objects for multiple printing plates is scheduled, Portfolio-CEGAR-SEQ often uses fewer printing plates than CEGAR-SEQ.