Space Defragmentation Heuristic for 2D and 3D Bin Packing Problems

One of main difficulties of multi-dimensional packing problems is the fragmentation of free space into several unusable small parts after a few items are packed. This study proposes a defragmentation technique to combine the fragmented space into a continuous usable space, which potentially allows the packing of additional items. We illustrate the effectiveness of this technique on the two- and three-dimensional Bin Packing Problems. In conjunction with a bin shuffling strategy for incremental improvement, our resultant algorithm outperforms all leading meta-heuristic approaches.