A reference length approach for the 3D strip packing problem

Lijun Wei, Wee-Chong Oon, Wenbin Zhu and Andrew Lim

European Journal of Operational Research, 2012, vol. 220, issue 1, 37-47

Abstract: In the three-dimensional strip packing problem (3DSP), we are given a container with an open dimension and a set of rectangular cuboids (boxes) and the task is to orthogonally pack all the boxes into the container such that the magnitude of the open dimension is minimized. We propose a block building heuristic based on extreme points for this problem that uses a reference length to guide its solution. Our 3DSP approach employs this heuristic in a one-step lookahead tree search algorithm using an iterative construction strategy. We tested our approach on standard 3DSP benchmark test data; the results show that our approach produces better solutions on average than all other approaches in literature for the majority of these data sets using comparable computation time.

Keywords: Packing; Best-fit heuristic; Combinatorial optimization; Look-ahead; Tree search; Greedy algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:220:y:2012:i:1:p:37-47

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2012.01.039

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