This paper represents an early, hierarchical approach to a specific technical problem (VLSI circuit extraction from CIF layouts) of its time, grappling with the issue of overlapping instances.

However, the core techniques discussed—reliance on the obsolete CIF format, rasterization-based processing, and a heuristic disjoint transformation—are fundamentally outdated and have been superseded by vastly more robust, accurate, and scalable vector-based methods in modern EDA tools.

While the abstract problem of analyzing hierarchical systems with overlaps exists in other domains, this paper offers no transferable technical methods to address them...

...any potential application would require inventing entirely new, domain-specific algorithms based only on a very high-level analogy.