A hybrid placement strategy for the three-dimensional strip packing problem

Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid placement strategy for the three-dimensional strip packing problem which involves packing a set of cuboids (‘boxes') into a three-dimensional bin (parallelepiped) of fixed width and height but unconstrained length (the ‘container'). The goal is to pack all of the boxes into the container, minimising its resulting length. This problem has potential industry application in stock cutting (wood, polystyrene, etc. - minimising wastage) and also cargo loading, as well as other applications in areas such as multi-dimensional resource scheduling. In addition to the proposed strategy a number of test results on available literature benchmark problems are presented and analysed. The results of empirical testing of the algorithm show that it out-performs other methods from the literature, consistently in terms of speed and solution quality-producing 28 best known results from 35 test cases.