ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the heuristics, metaheuristics, and exact algorithms for two-dimensional packing problems of general shapes. It explores the procedure of applying the bottom-left strategy to a given order the bottom-left algorithm. The chapter explains the irregular strip packing problem and introduces some practical algorithms for irregular packing problems. It focuses on the problem of packing irregular shapes represented in bitmap format and analyses the rectilinear block packing problem and also introduces various schemes used to represent solutions to the rectilinear block packing problem and algorithms based on such coding schemes. The chapter considers two-dimensional irregular packing problems, which have been actively studied in the last decade. It provides some basic techniques including bottom-left strategy, clustering strategy, and no-fit polygons. The chapter shows that various algorithms proposed for the irregular strip packing and bin packing problems and their variants. T. Imamichi et al. proposed an iterated local search based on nonlinear programming for the irregular strip packing problem.