A (5/3 + ε)-Approximation for Strip Packing

We study strip packing, which is one of the most classical two-dimensional packing problems: given a collection of rectangles, the problem is to find a feasible orthogonal packing without rotations into a strip of width 1 and minimum height. In this paper we present an approximation algorithm for the strip packing problem with absolute approximation ratio of 5/3 + ε for any ε > 0. This result significantly narrows the gap between the best known upper bounds of 2 by Schiermeyer and Steinberg and 1.9396 by Harren and van Stee and the lower bound 3/2.