Quadrilateral meshing algorithms impose certain constraints on the number of intervals or mesh edges of the curves bounding a surface. When constructing a conformal mesh of a collection of adjoining surfaces, the constraints for all of the surfaces must be simultaneously satisfied. These constraints can be formulated as an integer linear program. Not all solutions to this problem are equally desirable, however. The user typically indicates a goal (soft-set) or required (hard-set) number of intervals for each curve. The hard-sets constrain the problem further, while the soft-sets influence the objective function. This paper describes an algorithm for solving this interval assignment problem. The objective is to have a solution such that for each curve the positive or negative difference between its goal and assigned intervals is small relative to its goal intervals. The algorithm solves a series of linear programs, and comes close to minimizing the maximum vector of such differences. Th...
Scott A. Mitchell