Bidirectional best-fit heuristic considering compound placement for two dimensional orthogonal rectangular strip packing

The two dimensional orthogonal rectangular strip packing problem is a common NP-hard optimisation problem whereby a set of rectangular shapes must be placed on a fixed width stock sheet with infinite length in such a way that wastage is minimised and material utilisation is maximised. The bidirectional best-fit heuristic is a deterministic approach which has previously been shown to outperform existing heuristic methods as well as many metaheuristics from the literature. Here, we propose a modification to the original bidirectional best-fit heuristic whereby combinations of pairs of rectangles are considered generating improved results over standard benchmark sets.