---
title: "Space Defragmentation Heuristic for 2D and 3D Bin Packing Problems"
authors:
  - "Zhaoyi Zhang"
  - "Songshan Guo"
  - "Wenbin Zhu"
  - "Wee-Chong Oon"
  - "Andrew Lim"
doi: "10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-123"
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2011/123"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2011/0123.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2011
pages: "699-703"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Space Defragmentation Heuristic for 2D and 3D Bin Packing Problems

Zhaoyi Zhang, Songshan Guo, Wenbin Zhu, Wee-Chong Oon, Andrew Lim

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 699-703. DOI: [10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-123](https://doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-123)

## Abstract

One of main difficulties of multi-dimensional packing problems is the fragmentation of free space into several unusable small parts after a few items are packed. This study proposes a defragmentation technique to combine the fragmented space into a continuous usable space, which potentially allows the packing of additional items. We illustrate the effectiveness of this technique on the two- and three-dimensional Bin Packing Problems. In conjunction with a bin shuffling strategy for incremental improvement, our resultant algorithm outperforms all leading meta-heuristic approaches.