Abstract

Cutting workpieces of given shapes and sizes from an object of larger dimensions with minimal material loss is a practical problem whose optimal or suboptimal solutions have great economic value in many applications. The solution to this problem often requires automated tools, which may not be achievable for small and medium sized enterprises. For this, an approach is proposed based on the concept of virtual enterprise using a client-broker-server architecture as an implementational model. Details of the architecture and its implementation are analysed.