On solving rectangle bin packing problems using genetic algorithms

This paper presents an application of genetic algorithms in solving rectangle bin packing problems which belong to the class of NP-Hard optimization problems. There are three versions of rectangle bin packing problems to be discussed in this paper: the first version is to minimize the packing area, the second version is to minimize the height of a strip packing, and the final version is to minimize the number of bins used to pack the given items. Different versions of genetic algorithms are developed to solve the three versions of problems. Among these versions of genetic algorithms, we have demonstrated two ways of applying the genetic algorithms, either to solve the problem directly or to tune an existing heuristic algorithm so that the performance is improved. Experimental results are compared to well-known packing heuristics FFDH and HFF. From these results, we know that both methods can be useful in practice.