It promises materials savings of 10% over competitive nesting solutions and is designed to enable firms to minimise materials costs when using expensive substrates.

It is designed for industries that don't print graphics onto the materials, such as aerospace and automotive, where Zund's machines are used to cut expensive composites. However, the company believes it has applications in the graphics market.

Zund offers its Prepare-It package for graphics workflow, which offers nesting and supports images.

AutoNest has already had interest from vehicle livery firms producing the reflective patterns on emergency services vehicles using 3M Diamond Grade materials and believes it also has applications for cutting vinyl lettering.

"At this stage it's impossible to add graphics," said UK product manager Nick Reed. "But it's been picked up by a couple of people in print."

The firm is investigating whether the software can be developed to work with graphics files too following recent feedback from interested companies.

A demo version of the €3,500 (£2,959) software can be downloaded from the website www.zundautonest.com.

The software was developed by a specialist firm in the UK called Aptia, which has the exclusive rights to commercialise research into automated layouts at the University of Nottingham in the UK.