Heuristics for 1D and 2D bin packing
The two-dimensional rectangle bin packing is a classical problem in combinatorial optimization. In this problem, one is given a sequence of rectangles and the task is to pack these items into a minimum number of bins of size (W;H). No two rectangles may intersect or be contained inside one another. This problem has several real-world applications and is proven to be NP-hard by a reduction from the 2-partition problem. A lot of work has been done to develop efficient heuristic algorithms that approximate the optimal solution. The two-dimensional bin packing problem is a generalization of the one-dimensional bin packing problem.
In this web application you can visualize step by step some of the heuristic algorithms with your own data or with random data as the input.