Two Metaheuristics for Strip Packing Problems

The paper presents two metaheuristics, a tabu search algorithm (TSA) and a genetic algorithm (GA), for the so-called strip packing problem. Strip packing problems represent a special class of multidimensional packing problems. In the three-dimensional case the strip packing prob-lem may be characterized as a container loading problem with one variable container dimen-sion. The proposed metaheuristics were also parallelized on a coarse grained level. The se-quential and parallel methods are subjected to a comparative test which includes methods from other authors. For the two-dimensional case, the test is based on reference problems from the literature while several new reference problems are proposed for the three-dimensional case.