OpenNest-Engines/OpenNest.Engine.Astra/benchmarks

Astra development benchmark report

Measured locally on Linux with .NET SDK 8.0.425, Release builds, 2026-09-23. The shared-validator fix was verified on 2026-09-24; its results are recorded separately below. The baseline is Astra's original independent guillotine/bounding-rectangle implementation, archived before the contact-search rewrite. These are not measurements against Opus or a claim of performance on an unseen competition dataset.

Synthetic cases

Both versions were run on exactly the same programmatically generated geometry and stock. The driver validates materialized output with OpenNest.Benchmark.NestValidator, including quantity, stock settings, rotation, material overlap and spacing. Timings cover Solve only, exclude external validation, and are single-run observations rather than stable distributions. Every contact result is valid and complete. The baseline is valid but incomplete on plate-cap.

Case	Baseline area	Contact area	Change	Contact time (ms)
triangles	8064	4608	-42.9%	3354
circles	3456	3456	0.0%	1021
circles-dense	3456	2304	-33.3%	742
concave-L	5760	3456	-40.0%	1055
mixed	4608	3456	-25.0%	1990
holes	2304	1152	-50.0%	306
rectangles	3456	3456	0.0%	261
grain	4608	2304	-50.0%	527
scarce-stock	228	228	0.0%	1
tail	600	600	0.0%	4
plate-cap	100	400	4/10 → 10/10 placed	4

Excluding plate-cap, where baseline completion differs, purchased area fell from 36540 to 25020: 31.5% less area across these ten cases. The original solver usually took 0–30 ms; contact search takes approximately 1 ms to 3.4 s on this set. Packing quality improved at a substantial CPU cost. No speedup over the original baseline is claimed.

Extended generated cases

GeneratedCases.cs adds 23 jobs: rounded rectangles, T-shapes, trapezoids, pentagons, hexagons, rings, pipe flanges, ring/insert mixtures, curved C-shapes, narrow U-shapes, stars, and 12 seeded mixed jobs. These exercise all four quadrants, asymmetric edge margins, finite small-sheet inventory, translated source origins, zero/positive spacing, fixed non-cardinal rotations and bounded sweeps. The library supplies most shapes; the C, U and star contours are generated directly. Seeded cases use seeds 19073 through 19084.

Both versions place every requested part in all 23 jobs with valid output. Seven cases use less purchased area; the other sixteen match the baseline. Aggregate area drops from 58259 to 44353, 23.9% less area. The changed cases are:

Generated case	Baseline area	Contact area	Reduction
T-shapes	5917	2016	65.9%
Hexagons	2160	1080	50.0%
Pipe flanges	1932	966	50.0%
Curved C-shapes	6051	2150	64.5%
Narrow U-shapes	5925	3901	34.2%
Seed 19083	1968	984	50.0%
Seed 19084	2100	1050	50.0%

The initial fine-mesh curved-C search exceeded the driver's 90-second cancellation budget (an in-flight Minkowski operation delayed cancellation to 110 seconds). Separately coarsening its contact outline, padding both approximation errors, and retaining fine safety geometry reduced that case to approximately 2.3–2.5 seconds. No wall-clock cutoff was added to the engine. The final regression pass validates all 34 generated/synthetic jobs and all four DXF jobs; 27 independent xUnit cases also pass. Raw results are in results/.

Curved-hole validator fix (2026-09-24)

The generated ring/insert job exposed a shared-validator false positive. A ring with inner radius 3.5 containing a concentric radius-3 disk has 0.5 units of clearance, yet the host's triangulated collision check can report a violation with required spacing 0.175. The outcome also changes with translations. Checking every candidate against that routine made a small ring job take approximately 80–90 seconds.

Astra initially reserved curved cutouts as solid during placement, preserving the original drawing in output. This workaround finished the ring/insert job in about 50 ms at the baseline sheet cost. It has now been removed following a fix in OpenNest.Core/Geometry/Collision.cs.

Hole subtraction previously clipped each fragment independently against every triangle edge, duplicating surviving area. It also classified points with an epsilon-shifted boundary but intersected against the unshifted line, which could extrapolate outside the source segment. The corrected routine emits disjoint outside fragments and carries the inside remainder to the next edge. Classification and interpolation use the same signed cross products. Exact closing vertices and local-coordinate area checks avoid additional small-fragment errors. This remains the shared hand-written collision algorithm; Clipper is only an independent oracle in the new tests, not a replacement per-pair validator.

The eight original translated reproductions all pass. Regression coverage also rejects real spacing violations, checks both operand orders and windings, exercises all four quadrants, and compares overlap areas against Clipper on 80 seeded pairs with multiple/concave holes. The main suite passes 1,096 tests (12 font-fixture skips), Engine passes 170, and Astra passes 27. Astra's curved-hole tests now require a ring and insert to share stock whose usable area fits only the ring, proving that insertion is enabled.

All 34 synthetic/generated jobs remain valid and complete with unchanged sheet-area costs. The ring/insert job with hole search enabled takes about 4.8 seconds in this run and still uses two small sheets. This fix improves validity and enables insertion; it does not improve that job's stock plan. Results are in results/validator-fixed-synthetic-generated.csv. All four repository-DXF jobs also remain valid and complete at unchanged sheet-area costs; their rerun is recorded in results/validator-fixed-dxf.csv.

The isolated reproduction does not invoke any nesting engine:

dotnet run --project Engines/OpenNest.Engine.Astra/benchmarks -c Release -- --diagnose-ring

results/ring-validator-reproducer.txt retains the original failures; results/ring-validator-fixed.txt records the corrected outcomes. Rebuild the host's Core dependency when deploying. The benchmark validator's spacing rules and source are unchanged.

Repository DXFs

The four manifests under dxf/ use PT45, PT23 and PT11 repository drawings. Every result from both versions was valid and complete. Runs used --parallel 1.

Manifest	Baseline area	Contact area	Change
locked.manifest	115200	115200	0.0%
mixed.manifest	144000	115200	-20.0%
original.manifest	115200	115200	0.0%
volume.manifest	374400	374400	0.0%

The mixed three-drawing job improves 20%; the other three retain baseline sheet-area cost. The initial contact version regressed on volume; preserving a high-progress beam state and ranking with observed per-part delivery cost removed that regression. Final results purchase 720000 area units versus 748800, a 3.8% reduction across the four manifests. Fewer physical sheets sometimes have the same purchased area; those are not counted as area savings.

An exploratory run of the original manifest against StockLadder and Default found StockLadder valid/complete at the same 115200 area cost; Default's result was flagged for spacing. That single case does not establish general superiority. There is no Opus result available here.

Local geometry optimizations

Apart from the shared Core collision fix described above, these optimizations are in Astra. Astra caches NFPs and incrementally subtracts each newly placed part from available translation regions, avoiding repeated unions of all previous obstacles. A four-vertex rectangle configuration-space specialization avoids round-offset polygons and polygon collision work for exact axis-aligned rectangle contacts. During development, the 96-rectangle case dropped from roughly 1.5 s to 0.24 s after this specialization. This is an end-to-end observation, not an isolated component microbenchmark.

Precision regression tests cover exact clearances and rotated zero-spacing contacts. In the latter case, the host's four-decimal polygon rounding and triangulated collision test can reject a contact accepted by Clipper at six decimals. Astra now retains the original rotated frame for that validation, checks zero-clearance contacts with Core's collision primitive, and tries tiny nearby translations when exact contact is unsafe.

Reproduce

Run from the repository root:

dotnet run --project Engines/OpenNest.Engine.Astra/benchmarks -c Release

Run only the extended generated suite with -- current generated; the first positional argument is either a previous plugin DLL or a label for the current build. Invalid layouts and crashes make the driver exit with a nonzero status. Incompleteness is reported separately.

The standalone driver also accepts a prior plugin DLL and optional case-name filter:

dotnet run --project Engines/OpenNest.Engine.Astra/benchmarks -c Release -- /path/to/previous/OpenNest.Engine.Astra.dll triangles

An isolated assembly load context prevents .NET from silently substituting the currently built plugin when comparing another version with the same assembly name. Historical baseline CSV files are included; the old binary is not committed. The driver's 90-second cancellation budget is a benchmark safeguard and is not an elapsed-time stopping rule inside the engine.

For real DXFs, build and deploy the plugin as described in the parent README, then:

dotnet OpenNest.Benchmark/bin/Release/net8.0/OpenNest.Benchmark.dll Engines/OpenNest.Engine.Astra/benchmarks/dxf --engines AstraNestingEngine --parallel 1 --csv /tmp/astra-dxf.csv

The CSV files under results/ retain the measured results. Tests run independently:

dotnet test Engines/OpenNest.Engine.Astra/tests/OpenNest.Engine.Astra.Tests.csproj -c Release