An improved skyline based heuristic for the 2D strip packing problem and its efficient implementation

The best-fit heuristic by Burke et al. (2004) is a simple but effective approach for the 2D Strip Packing (2DSP) problem. In this paper, we propose an improved best-fit heuristic for the 2DSP. Instead of selecting the rectangle with the largest width, we use the fitness number to select the best rectangle fitting into the gap. An efficient implementation pattern with a time complexity of O(n log n) (n is the number of rectangles) is provided for the improved best-fit heuristic. A simple random local search is used to improve the results by trying different sequences. The experiment on the benchmark test sets shows that the final approach is both effective and efficient.