My incoming material is a 1.2 m × 2.4 m board, 17 mm thick. After cutting, it becomes 8–10 pieces of different sizes. If we cut one big board into smaller pieces we can treat it as an assembly/decomposition step. But for the animation, every time the big board will produce a different number of small pieces (say 8–10), and each piece will be a different size. Any suggestions on how to handle that? Visually, the small pieces must be arranged to match the original 1.2 m × 2.4 m layout so the robot arm can pick them up and move them to the next station.
You can create 1 product type for the board, and then 3 assembly product types for similarly sized board that consists of 8, 9 and 10 smaller pieces. These assemblies can then easily be “disassembled” in a follow-up process.
If you just want to split a 1.2m*2.4m regular shaped board into multiple regular shaped boards without changing the thickness, you can use the method of numericalizing the modeling by generating a smaller board and shortening the original board as you cut it, so that they butt up and look as if they were cut off in one piece. 