A look-forward heuristic for packing spheres into a three-dimensional bin

In this paper a look-forward heuristic is proposed in order to solve the problem of packing spheres into a three-dimensional bin of fixed height and depth but variable length. The objective is to pack all the spheres into the bin of minimum length. This problem is also known under the name of three-dimensional strip packing problem. The computational investigation, conducted on a set of benchmark instances taken from the literature, shows that the method is effective since it improves most of the best known results.