Hybrid approach for containment problems

A hybrid method combining a genetic algorithms based containment algorithm with a complex mating algorithm is presented. The approach uses mating between a pair of objects as means to accelerate the packaging process. In this study, mating between two objects has been defined as positioning one object relative to others by merging common features that are assigned through mating conditions between them. A constrained move set is derived from the mating condition that allows the transformation of a component in each mating pair to be fully or partially constrained with respect to the other. By using mating in the packaging, the number of components to be placed can be reduced significantly and overall speed of the packaging process can also be improved. The hybrid method uses a genetic algorithm to search mating pairs and global positions of selected objects. The mating pair is mated first by a simple mating condition which is derived from geometric features of mating objects. If a proper mating is not obtained, the complex mating algorithm finds an optimal mating condition using Quasi-Newton method.