The Analytical Computational Geometry Library: A Computational Geometry Library for Scientists and Engineers

By Paul B. Morton

This book provides a comprehensive reference as well as a detailed and extensively-annotated user's guide for ACGL(tm). ACGL is a software library that provides analytical computational-geometry capabilities which make it easy to use analytical methods, commonly employed in science and engineering, to work directly on complex geometric systems in a natural and intuitive manner. Further, these systems can be dynamic and can contain polygon and/or curved shapes. Geometric systems are an important component in many larger systems, however, most of the capabilities for the design and analysis of geometric systems are based on combinatorial algorithms. These algorithms are, at best, difficult to integrate into analytical methods and, in some cases, are fundamentally incompatible with them. Additionally, these algorithms work primarily with polygon shapes and do not provide any significant capabilities to work with curved shapes. ACGL is a C++ class-library that starts to substantially eliminate these fundamental limitations by providing computational-geometry capabilities, supporting both curved and polygon shapes, for direct use in an analytical environment. That is, in an environment where the design and analysis of a system are performed in terms of the system's characteristic functions and, if needed, the functions' derivatives. The user's guide demonstrates many of ACGL's capabilities and illustrates how various elements of the library interact and work together. It presents a detailed development of the analytical solutions for a sequence of progressively more complex and dynamic shape-packing problems. This problem is one type of geometric system that is encountered fairly often in practice since many manufactured products are composed of multiple subcomponents which must be arranged so that none of them overlap. In most cases, however, developing solutions to shape-packing problems has required both an extensive expertise in specialized combinatorial algorithms and a significant software development effort. This means developing these solutions is usually out of reach for many scientists and engineers. By using ACGL in combination with a modest amount of programming skill and effort, this guide also demonstrates that developing solutions is now well within reach for many types of shape-packing problems. While ACGL is a fully object-oriented C++ class-library, only a modest amount of C++ knowledge is necessary to begin working effectively with it. Therefore, to make this book and the practical application of its concepts accessible to the broadest range of scientists and engineers, all of the book's examples have been developed using procedural C++ instead of fully object-oriented C++.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1542805953
• ISBN13: 9781542805957
• Release Date: August 2018
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 266 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 0.6" x 8.5"