An improved priority heuristic for the fixed guillotine rectangular packing problem

Abstract

Abstract An improved priority heuristic (IPH) is presented for the guillotine rectangular packing problem with a fixed orientation constraint. This algorithm can continuously divide the remaining space into blocks and recursively layout the entire space by filling each current block. IPH inherits the placement method of PH and adopts an improved space partitioning rule. The partitioning rule comprehensively considers the effects of the newly generated block on subsequent item placement. Thus, the remaining space can be filled as much as possible from a probability perspective. Given the introduction and utilization of different solving parameters, the worst-case time complexity is O(40n 2). Computational results on benchmark datasets show that IPH outperforms existing heuristics on average. For large-scale instances, several perfect layouts can be obtained for the first time.