A skyline heuristic for the 2D rectangular packing and strip packing problems

► Transformed 2D strip packing into a series of 2D rectangular packing problems. ► Represented state of a partial packing as a skyline. ► Proposed new fitness measure to decide where to place next item. ► Employed Tabu Search on packing sequences to enhance solution quality. ► Performed comprehensive experiments and comparisons to illustrate effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a greedy heuristic for the 2D rectangular packing problem (2DRP) that represents packings using a skyline; the use of this heuristic in a simple tabu search approach outperforms the best existing approach for the 2DRP on benchmark test cases. We then make use of this 2DRP approach as a subroutine in an “iterative doubling” binary search on the height of the packing to solve the 2D rectangular strip packing problem (2DSP). This approach outperforms all existing approaches on standard benchmark test cases for the 2DSP.