An off-line algorithm for steel coils packing problem

In steel factories, the packing of steel coils is very important. When solving a practical problem of some factory, we find that all coils' heights hi satisfy: 1/5 ≤ hi/H ≥ 1/3, any given i (in which H is the height limit). For this problem, an off-line algorithm is proposed. Practical data tests show that the algorithm is feasible in solving steel coils packing problem. Moreover, a great deal of data simulation tests show that the algorithm is better than the two classical off-line bin-packing algorithms (FFD, BFD) in solving one-dimension bin-packing problems when all items' heights satisfy the condition.