An Exact Approach to the Strip-Packing Problem

Abstract

We consider the problem of orthogonally packing a given set of rectangular items into a given strip, by minimizing the overall height of the packing. The problem is NP-hard in the strong sense, and finds several applications in cutting and packing. We propose a new relaxation that produces good lower bounds and gives information to obtain effective heuristic algorithms. These results are used in a branch-and-bound algorithm, which was able to solve test instances from the literature involving up to 200 items.