An Efficient Algorithm for 3D Rectangular Box Packing
1. INTRODUCTION The best utilization of capacity of a vehicle reduces the number of vehicles used in a shipment. This is very important for companies especially deal in transportation and/or exporting. In order to transport more packages with less number of vehicles, boxes should be packed optimally or near optimally. So, this helps to reduce the transportation costs. The problem of packing all boxes into a container is called 3D packing problem. The 3D packing problem is very complicated. If number of boxes increases, the complexity of the problem increases with nondeterministic polynomial time George and Robinson (1980). Therefore, the packing problem is a type of NP-Hard problem. For the solution method of 3D packing problem, many different methods are suggested by George and Robinson (1980), NGoi et.al. (1994), Eley (2002) and Pisinger (2002). Data structures methods (Brunetta and Gre’goire (2005)), some meta-heuristic methods like genetic algorithm (Gehring and Borthfeld