A hyper-heuristic approach to strip packing problems

Abstract

In this paper we propose a genetic algorithm based hyper-heuristic for producing good quality solutions to strip packing problems. Instead of using just a single decoding heuristic, we employ a set of heuristics. This enables us to search a larger solution space without loss of efficiency. Empirical studies are presented on two-dimensional orthogonal strip packing problems which demonstrate that the algorithm operates well across a wide range of problem instances. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.