Almost a year ago now, I started a series of blog post on the bin packing problem. But after the first three posts, various reasons caused the research I still had to do for the fourth part to be massively delayed. It’s only now that I have finally found the time to finish my research and write up the fourth installment.   After a ...

In the first post of this series, I explained the bin-packing problem and established a baseline solution. The second post investigated ways to increase the packing efficiency. In none of these posts did I pay particular attention to performance – and frankly, it shows. Performance of all solutions presented thus far sucks eggs. Time to see what ...

In my previous post, I explained the bin packing problem, explained an example scenario, and established a baseline for both speed and efficiency of bin packing algorithms by writing a rather crude cursor-based procedure. In this part, I will look at some small modifications that can be made to this code to make it better at packing bins as full ...

Some problems can only be solved by brute-forcing every possible combination. The problem with such an approach, is that execution time grows exponentially as the amount of input data grows – so that even on the best possible hardware, you will get inacceptable performance once the input data goes beyond the size of a small test set. These ...