Optimal polygon cover problems and applications

Polygon cover problems are important in several applied areas, such as material layout, layered manufacturing, radiation therapy and radiosurgery, etc. In this paper, we study three optimal polygon cover problems: monotone polygon cover among obstacles, star-shaped polygon cover among obstacles, and strip cover for trapezoidalized polygons. Based on some interesting geometric observations, we develop efficient algorithms for solving these problems. The complexity bounds of our monotone cover and star-shaped cover algorithms are comparable to those of the previously best known algorithms for simpler cases of the problems without considering obstacles. Our strip cover algorithm improves the quality of the previously best known solutions.