A two-stage look-ahead heuristic for packing spheres into a three-dimensional bin of minimum length

Abstract

In this work we propose a two-stage look-ahead heuristic for packing a given set of spheres into a three-dimensional bin of fixed height and depth but variable length. The problem consists to pack all the spheres into the bin of minimum length. This problem is also knownunder the name of three-dimensional strip packing problem. The computational results conducted on a set of benchmark instances taken from the literature indicates that the proposed method is effective since it improves most of the best known results by finding new upper bounds for the length of the bin.