Cost-Optimal Cutting and Packing for Nuclear Decommissioning

During nuclear decommissioning, large structures often need to be cut into smaller parts before being packed into containers. Cutting and packing incur costs, and improving efficiency in one often increases costs in the other, requiring a trade-off. Considering the operational costs of different cutting tools and container types, determining the optimal number of parts to cut a structure into, and how to pack these parts efficiently, is challenging. This paper presents a novel voxel-based cutting and packing optimization algorithm designed to minimize overall costs for decommissioning nuclear structures. We define cost as comprising two factors: cutting cost, which depends on the amount of cutting required and the type of tool used, and packing cost, which is determined by the number of containers needed and the unit cost of a container. We demonstrate that our algorithm can successfully minimize overall cutting and packing costs. Additionally, we show how our algorithm can be used to compare different decommissioning scenarios by cutting a simple structure found in nuclear decommissioning and packing the pieces into two different container types with different unit costs. Our results also show that the algorithm outperforms a minimal cutting approach, where a minimum number of cuts is used to segment the structure.