New Piston-Packing

Web Piston: Choosing a New Strategy

Web Piston is a successful enterprise that provides its small business and individual clients with automated web design and web hosting services. Owing to the rapidly changing competitive environment, however, the company’s founder, Ricardo Lasa, feels that a change in strategy is necessary. The case describes the competitive environment for web hosting and outlines four alternative strategies:...

Optimal Rectangle Packing: New Results

We present new results on the problem of finding an enclosing rectangle of minimum area that will contain a given a set of rectangles. Many simple scheduling tasks can be modelled by this NP-complete problem. We present a new lower bound on the amount of wasted space in a partial solution, a new dominance condition that prunes many partial solutions, and extend our algorithms to packing unorien...

New bin packing fast lower bounds

In this paper, we address the issue of computing fast lower bounds for the Bin Packing problem, i.e., bounds that have a computational complexity dominated by the complexity of ordering the items by non-increasing values of their volume. We introduce new classes of fast lower bounds with improved asymptotic worst-case performance compared to well-known results for similar computational effort. ...

New facets for the set packing polytope

New Improvements in Optimal Rectangle Packing

The rectangle packing problem consists of finding an enclosing rectangle of smallest area that can contain a given set of rectangles without overlap. Our algorithm picks the x-coordinates of all the rectangles before picking any of the y-coordinates. For the x-coordinates, we present a dynamic variable ordering heuristic and an adaptation of a pruning algorithm used in previous solvers. We then...