A priority heuristic for the guillotine rectangular packing problem

•New priority heuristic is presented for non-staged guillotine rectangular packing.•This heuristic first selects one available item for a given position by a priority strategy and places it.•Then it divides the remaining space into two rectangular bins and packs them recursively.•The proposed algorithm is based on a recursive structure.•Computational results have shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing heuristics in the literature.

A new priority heuristic is presented for the guillotine rectangular packing problem. This heuristic first selects one available item for a given position by a priority strategy. Then it divides the remaining space into two rectangular bins and packs them recursively, and its worst-case time complexity is T(n)=O(n2)T(n)=O(n2). The proposed algorithm is a general, simple and efficient method, and can solve different packing problems. Computational results on a wide range of benchmark problems have shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing heuristics in the literature, on average.