Abstract
Automatic layout of irregular warp-knitted jacquard shoe uppers is subject to a fixed fabric width, prescribed wale-course orientation, and process-specific safety-distance constraints. This study proposes an adaptive optimization method that combines cell-based geometric preprocessing with two complementary layout strategies. For each shoe upper, the minimum bounding box and the contour projections along cell columns and cell rows are computed to efficiently determine feasible lateral and longitudinal offsets. A single-row sequential strategy provides flexible local adjustment, whereas a two-row grouping strategy maintains stable nesting between adjacent rows. The better feasible solution is selected automatically using a lexicographic evaluation criterion. Experiments on irregular and symmetric shoe-upper patterns achieved maximum normalized output densities of 20.55 and 22.88 shoe uppers per 1000 cell rows, respectively. For representative configurations containing 12 shoe uppers, automatic strategy selection reduced the total layout height by 3.95% and 5.56%, while the mean solving time ranged from 64 to 115 ms. The proposed method reduces manual placement in computer-aided design (CAD) systems and provides an efficient approach to production-oriented layout planning.