Solving Irregular Strip Packing problems by hybridising simulated annealing and linear programming

In this paper a hybrid algorithm to solve Irregular Strip Packing problems is presented. The metaheuristic simulated annealing is used to guide the search over the solution space while linear programming models are solved to generate neighbourhoods during the search process. These linear programming models, which are used to locally optimise the layouts, derive from the application of compaction and separation algorithms. Computational tests were run using instances that are commonly used as benchmarks in the literature. The best results published so far have been improved by this new hybrid packing algorithm. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.