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A heuristic algorithm for the strip packing problem

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Abstract

The two-dimensional strip packing problem is to pack a given set of rectangles into a strip with a given width and infinite height so as to minimize the required height of the packing. From the computational point of view, the strip packing problem is an NP-hard problem. With the B*-tree representation, this paper first presents a heuristic packing strategy which evaluates the positions used by the rectangles. Then an effective local search method is introduced to improve the results and a heuristic algorithm (HA) is further developed to find a desirable solution. Computational results on randomly generated instances and popular test instances show that the proposed method is efficient for the strip packing problem.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Prof. Y.W. Chang, Prof. Heidi Smith for the help with the B*-tree package, NFDH/FFDH packages, respectively. Special thanks also go to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which help improving the quality of our manuscript greatly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, 350108, China

    Jianli Chen & Wenxing Zhu

  2. College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, 350108, China

    Zheng Peng

Authors
  1. Jianli Chen
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  2. Wenxing Zhu
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  3. Zheng Peng
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wenxing Zhu.

Additional information

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant 61170308, in part by the National Key Basic Research Special Foundation (NKBRSF) of China under Grant 2011CB808000, and in part by the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program (RFDP) of China under Grant 20093514110004.

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Chen, J., Zhu, W. & Peng, Z. A heuristic algorithm for the strip packing problem. J Heuristics 18, 677–697 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-012-9203-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-012-9203-9

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