The nesting of two-dimensional patterns onto a given raw sheet has applications in a number industries. It is a common problem often faced by designers in the shipbuilding, garment making, blanking die design, glass and wood industries. This paper presents a multi-stage layout approach for nesting two-dimensional patterns by using artificial intelligence techniques with a relatively short computation time. The raw material with irregular boundaries and internal defects which must be considered in various cases of nesting was also investigated in this study. The proposed nesting approach consists of two stages : initial layout stage and layout improvement stage. The initial layout configuration is achieved by the self-organizing assisted layout(SOAL) algorithm while in the layout improvement stage, the simulated annealing(SA) is adopted for a finer optimization.