Julia Bennell

Packing Three-Dimensional Irregular Objects Because of its many applications in practice, the cutting and packing literature is extensive and well established. It is mostly concerned with problems in one and two dimensions or with problems where some regularity of the pieces is assumed (e.g., packing boxes). However, the rise of applications in the realm of three-dimensional printing and additive manufacturing has created a demand for efficient packing of three-dimensional irregular objects. In “Voxel-Based Solution Approaches to the Three-Dimensional Irregular Packing Problem,” Lamas-Fernandez, Martinez-Sykora, and Bennell propose a series of tools to tackle this problem using voxels. These include geometric tools, a mathematical model, local search neighborhoods, and details on implementation of metaheuristic algorithms. These tools are tested extensively, and computational results provided show their effectiveness compared with state-of-the-art literature.