Bidirectional best-fit heuristic for orthogonal rectangular strip packing

In a non-guillotinable rectangular strip packing problem (RF-SPP), the best orthogonal placement of given rectangular pieces on a strip of stock sheet having fixed width and infinite height are searched. The aim is to minimize the height of the strip while including all the pieces in appropriate orientations. In this study, a novel bidirectional best-fit heuristic (BBF) is introduced for solving RF-SPPs. The proposed heuristic as a new feature considers the gaps in both horizontal and vertical directions during the placement process. The performance of BBF is compared to some previous approaches, including one of the best heuristics from the literature. BBF achieves better results than the existing heuristics and delivers a better or matching performance as compared to the most of the previously proposed meta-heuristics for solving RF-SPPs.