An Efficient Heuristic Algorithm for the Rectangular Packing Problem

This paper studies the classic two-dimensional rectangle packing (2DRP) problem in a fixed rectangular container. To address this problem, we propose an efficient variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithm based on several new neighborhood structures and a new decoding procedure. For a given sequence of rectangles, the new decoding procedure can generate a packing configuration by sequentially placing the rectangles on the boundary of partial configuration. To assess the performance of algorithm, the extensive computational experiments were conducted on a set of benchmark instances widely used in the literature. Computational results show that the proposed algorithm is very efficient compared to the state-of-art algorithms from the literature and able to obtain the best-known solution for 19 out of the 21 benchmark instances.