A (5/3+ε)(5/3+ε)-approximation for strip packing

We study strip packing, which is one of the most classical two-dimensional packing problems: given a collection of rectangles, the problem is to find a feasible orthogonal packing without rotations into a strip of width 1 and minimum height. In this paper we present an approximation algorithm for the strip packing problem with absolute approximation ratio of 5/3+ε5/3+ε for any ε>0ε>0. This result significantly narrows the gap between the best known upper bound and the lower bound of 3/2; previously, the best upper bound was 1.9396 due to Harren and van Stee.