An agent-based approach to the two-dimensional guillotine bin packing problem

The two-dimensional guillotine bin packing problem consists of packing, without overlap, small rectangular items into the smallest number of large rectangular bins where items are obtained via guillotine cuts. This problem is solved using a new guillotine bottom left (GBL) constructive heuristic and its agent-based (A-B) implementation. GBL, which is sequential, successively packs items into it bin and creates it new bin every time it can no longer fit any unpacked item into the current one. A-B, which is pseudo-parallel, uses the simplest system of artificial life. This system consists of active agents dynamically interacting in real time to jointly fill the bins while each agent is driven by its own parameters, decision process, and fitness assessment. A-B is particularly fast and yields near-optimal solutions. Its modularity makes it easily adaptable to knapsack related problems. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.