A quasi-human algorithm for the two dimensional rectangular strip packing problem: in memory of Prof. Wenqi Huang

Abstract

This paper presents a quasi-human algorithm for the rectangular strip packing problem without guillotine constraint. The basic version of the algorithm works according to seven heuristic selection rules, which are designed to select a corner-occupying action. The strengthened version of the algorithm adopts a branching scheme in which the basic version of the algorithm is applied in a heuristic series of parallel branches. Computational tests carried on eight sets of well-known benchmark instances show that the algorithm is efficient for approximately solving the problem. In comparison with the best algorithms in the literature, the algorithm performs better for zero-waste instances and large scale non-zero-waste instances.