Packing a Trunk
Friedrich Eisenbrand, Stefan Funke, Joachim Reichel, Elmar Schoemer
We report on an ongoing project with a German car manufacturer. The task is to
practically compute (approximate) solutions to a specific large-scale packing problem.
Given a polyhedral model of a car trunk, the aim is to pack as many identical boxes of
size $4 \times 2 \times 1$ units as possible into the interior of the trunk. This measure is important for
car manufacturers because it is the standard in the European Union.
Our experiments show that for all considered instances we can get very close to the optimal
solution in reasonable time.
PDF