A triple‐solution approach for the rectangular level strip packing problem is presented, where m item types with specified demands are packed in levels into a strip with definite width and infinite height to minimize the occupied height, with the constraint that the items in the same level cannot be placed one on top of the other. The approach contains two phases and considers three types of solutions. In phase one, two types of solutions, obtained respectively from solving residual problems using column generation and from looking ahead, are considered and the best is selected as phase‐one solution. In phase two, an integer programming model is solved over the levels generated in phase‐one to obtain phase‐two solution. Finally the better one of the phase‐one and phase‐two solutions are selected. Computational results indicate that the approach is effective for both the instances with strongly heterogeneous items and those with weakly heterogeneous items.
