Method and device for optimizing a glass cutting plan by a guillotine cutter

A method of cutting a batch of rectangular pieces of glass out from at least one sheet of glass, said method comprising:

• determining an optimized cutting plan to cut the batch of pieces of glass out from the at least one sheet of glass for stacking on at least one frame, the determining including initializing by defining cutting constraints and positioning constraints for said pieces of glass together with an optimization criterion;
• creating a tree comprising a root and leaves, each tree presenting a complete cutting plan enabling all of the pieces of said batch to be cut out, each other node of the tree representing a partial cutting plan, the partial cutting plan associated with a node of the tree being obtained by adding to the partial cutting plan associated with a parent node of said node of the tree, and in compliance with said cutting constraints and positioning constraints, a next piece for said at least one frame determined in compliance with a sequence predetermined for the at least one frame;
• selecting a complete cutting plan associated with a leaf of the tree as a function of said optimization criterion;
• cutting the batch of rectangular pieces of glass out from the at least one sheet of glass based on the selected complete cutting plan;
• and
• stacking the cut pieces on the at least one frame, the pieces for any one frame are placed on the at least one sheet of glass that is to be cut up based on the sequence that is predetermined for that frame,
• wherein creating the tree comprises:
• creating, under said root and for each of said at least one frame, a node associated with a partial cutting plan for each of the acceptable positions of the first piece of said at least one frame while complying with said cutting constraints and positioning constraints;
• and
• at least one iteration, each iteration comprising:
• selecting a current node of the tree as a function of characteristics of the partial cutting plan represented by the selected current node;
• and
• creating at least one child node of said current node, the cutting plan associated with said child node being obtained by adding to the partial cutting plan associated with said current node, and while complying with said cutting constraints and positioning constraints, the next piece of said at least one frame taken in accordance with the sequence predetermined for that at least one frame.