A new approach to rectangle-packing

The rectangle‐packing problem is the problem of placing several given rectangles of arbitrary width and height into a minimum area rectangle without overlapping. This problem can be applied to VLSI packaging design, for which the area significantly affects the fabrication cost. Since this is an NP‐hard optimization problem, solutions have been attempted by using heuristic algorithms such as the SA method. The representation of the packing solution is the key to efficiency. Recently, a dramatic representation method of the packing solution called Sequence‐Pair has been proposed, so that a high‐grade solution can be sought at high speed. In this paper, based on this representation, a high‐speed algorithm is proposed that derives rectangle‐packing by means of a simple geometrical procedure. It is shown through the evaluation of MCNC benchmark data ami49 that the present algorithm enables high‐speed search of a high‐grade packing solution even for data with many rectangles. © 2000 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 83(12): 94–104, 2000