The Two-Dimensional Packing Problem for Irregular Objects

• Main Authors: CHEN, Ping, FU, Zhaohui, LIM, Andrew, RODRIGUES, Brian
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2004
• Subjects: Packing; cutting; irregular objects; meta-heuristics; heuristics; Operations and Supply Chain Management
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/2457; https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218213004001624
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Packing and cutting problems arise in a wide variety of industrial situations. The basic problem is that of determining a good arrangement of objects in a region without any overlap. Much research has been done on two and three dimensional rectangular packing while there has been little work done on irregular packing. In this work, we study the two-dimensional irregular packing problem and provide heuristic solutions which use rectilinear and piecewise-linear representations of objects. These heuristics include Genetic Algorithms and Tabu Search. Experimentation gives good results.