A global optimization method for packing problems

The packing optimization problem is to seek the best way of placing a given set of rectangular boxes within a rectangular container with minimal volume. Current packing optimization methods (Chen et al., Li and Chang ) are either difficult to find an optimal solution or required to use too many extra 0-1 variables to solve the problems. This paper proposes a new method for finding the global optimum of the packing problem within tolerable error based on piecewise linearization techniques, which is more computationally efficient than current methods.