I am experiencing a significant drop in material efficiency when scaling up the quantity of a project in the Community Edition.
The issue: When optimizing for 1 project (standard set of items), the algorithm requires 18 sheets with a waste percentage of 9.90%.
However, when I scale the exact same project to 10 sets (using both 3000x1200 and 2400x1200 stock sizes), the algorithm requires 185 sheets instead of the expected 180 or less. The waste percentage increases to 11.58%.
Observation: The software seems to create repetitive layouts (e.g., x10, x20) that leave significant empty spaces on panels instead of mixing parts across all available sheets to minimize waste. Some layouts result in over 45% waste on individual sheets, which should be filled with smaller parts from the overall list.
Stock used:
Increasing the quantity should theoretically improve or at least maintain the same efficiency, but here it causes a disproportionate increase in required material.
I am changing the group quantity from 1 to 10.