41 Optimization of an Irregular 2D Packing Problem by a Genetic-Based Heuristic Algorithm

In this paper, we develop a new approach for packing problems of 2D irregular items onto an object with a fixed width and unlimited length. We used a two-stage packing approach based on grid approximation with an integer representation based genetic algorithm (GA) to find the optimum sequence of the items to be used in bottom-left (BL) strategy. In the experiments section, the effectiveness of the proposed methodology is validated by the experiments in the apparel industry, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the commonly used bottom-left placement strategy in combination with random search (RS).