Article ID: | iaor20011834 |
Country: | Japan |
Volume: | E83-A |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 639 |
End Page Number: | 645 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2000 |
Journal: | IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences |
Authors: | Kajitani Yoji, Yamazaki Hiroyuki, Sakanushi Keishi, Nakatake Shigetoshi |
Keywords: | computers: data-structure, manufacturing industries, combinatorial analysis, graphs, optimization: simulated annealing |
The three dimensional (3D) packing problem is to arrange given rectangular boxes in a rectangular box of the minimum volume without overlapping each other. As an approach, this paper introduces the system of three sequences of the box labels, the sequence-triple, to encode the topology of the 3D-packing. The topology is the system of relative relations in pairs of boxes such as right-of, above, front-of, etc. It will be proved that the sequence-triple represents the topology of the tractable 3D-packings which is a 3D-packing such that there is an order of the boxes along which all the boxes are extracted one by one in a certain fixed direction without disturbing the other remaining boxes. The idea is extended to the system of five ordered sequences, the sequence-quintuple. A decoding rule is given by which any 3D-packing is represented. These coding systems are applied to design heuristic algorithms by simulated annealing which search the codes for better 3D-packings. Experimental results show convincing proof of their usefulness as automated packing algorithms.