Efficient Algorithms for Approximating the Centroids of Monotone Directions in a Polyhedron

Abstract

We present efficient algorithms for computing centroid directions for each of the three types of monotonicity in a polyhedron: strong, weak, and directional monotonicity, which can be used for optimizing directions in many 3D manufacturing processes. Strongly- and directionally-monotone directions are the poles of great circles separating a set of spherical polygons on the unit sphere, the centroids of which are shown to be obtained by applying the previous result for determining the maximum intersection of the set of their dual spherical polygons. Especially in this paper, we focus on developing an efficient method for approximating the weakly-monotone centroid, which is the pole of one of the great circles intersecting a set of spherical polygons on the unit sphere. The original problem is approximately reduced into computing the intersection of great bands for avoiding complicated computational complexity of non-convex objects on the unit sphere, which can be realized with practical linear-time operations.