AN EFFICIENT HEURISTIC ALGORITHM FOR TWO-DIMENSIONAL RECTANGULAR PACKING PROBLEM WITH CENTRAL RECTANGLE

This paper presents a heuristic algorithm for solving a specific NP-hard 2D rectangular packing problem in which a rectangle called central rectangle is required to be placed in the center of the final layout, and the aspect ratio of the container is also required to be in a given range. The key component of the proposed algorithm is a greedy constructive procedure, according to which, the rectangles are packed into the container one by one and each rectangle is packed into the container by an angle-occupying placement with maximum fit degree. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on two groups of 35 well-known benchmark instances. Computational results disclose that the proposed algorithm outperforms the previous algorithm for the packing problem. For the first group of test instances, solutions with average filling rate 99.31% can be obtained; for the real-world layout problem in the second group, the filling rate of the solution is 94.75%.