Packing Algorithms May Save the Planet

An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist reports on how competitions to devise better packing algorithms could help cut the environmental impact of deliveries and shipping. A new record setter at packing differently-sized discs into the smallest space without overlapping them has potential to be applied to real world 3D problems, researchers claim." Ok the title might be a little ridiculous, but the ridiculous packaging used to ship a few tiny objects by some shippers is pretty shameful.

Comments

Packing algorithms don't just apply to shipping

[Fungii]

Something the summariser seems to have missed.. This kind of problem comes up in a lot of different places.

One example would be brain tumor treatment using lasers.

Pack the rubbish too

[oldhack]

Pack the rubbish in the garbage dumps to allow air to flow through them. It will expedite, no, actually allow, biodegradation (sp?) by allowing the bacteria to live and do its work - biodegradable materials will actually mean something then.

This coffee tastes funny.

UPS already does this, sort of.

[R2.0]

When I worked for UPS in school, they used manual labor to load the trailers they used to send packages to the next facility. Loaders used their eyes, brains, and some basic tips to pack the trailer as tight as possible while using totally random sized packages. If you did well, you were rewarded; if you didn't, you were...not.

These guys would be well advised to watch how those trailers are loaded to figure out what algorithm the loader is using internally - we could get those trailers packed pretty damned tight.

Re:Wall-E

[Joce640k]

We're getting there... search for "great pacific garbage patch": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

Not just for shipping, not just in 3D

[veganboyjosh]

I work for a company that produces paper products. A large part of what we do is die cut the sheets into different shapes. We charge our customers for these shapes according to how many we get out of a sheet.

Sometimes the shapes are square/rectangular, which nest next to each other very well. Generally, they do not. Among other things, I am tasked with figuring out how many shapes we can get out of a sheet of paper. With the irregular shapes, the best method I've found is just to brute force the problem, trying various layouts to see if orienting the shapes one way will get us one or two more shapes out of a sheet. It's not a simple area problem, since some shapes nest very well, and some don't. I do have tricks I've learned to help speed the process, but I'd love to have something like this software, which would take the one-up shape, and tell me how many I can get out of a sheet of paper.