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A pure quasi-human algorithm for solving the cuboid packing problem

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Abstract

We excavate the wisdom from an old Chinese proverb “gold corner, silver side and strawy void”, and further improve it into “maximum value in diamond cave” for solving the NP-hard cuboid packing problem. We extract, integrate and formalize the idea by west modern mathematical tools, and propose a pure quasi-human algorithm. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on two sets of public benchmarks. For 100 strongly heterogeneous difficult benchmarks, experiments show an average packing utilization of 87.31%, which surpasses current best record reported in the literature by 1.83%. For 47 difficult benchmarks without orientation constraint, experiments show an average volume utilization of 92.05%, which improves current best record reported in the literature by 1.05%.

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Correspondence to Kun He.

Additional information

Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 60773194), the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2004CB318000), and Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 20070420174)

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Huang, W., He, K. A pure quasi-human algorithm for solving the cuboid packing problem. Sci. China Ser. F-Inf. Sci. 52, 52–58 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-009-0005-0

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