A bidirectional building approach for the 2D constrained guillotine knapsack packing problem

•We combine two well-known methods into a coherent algorithm.•We place a block instead of a single rectangle in each step.•We divide the input sheet into successively smaller sheets at each step.•We outperform all existing approaches on standard benchmark instances.

This paper investigates the 2D guillotine knapsack packing problem, in which the objective is to select and cut a set of rectangles from a sheet with fixed size and maximize the total profit of the selected rectangles. The orientation of the rectangles is fixed. And the guillotine cut, in which the cut must be parallel to the sides of the sheet to divide it into two completely separated sheets, is required. Two well-known methods, namely the top-down and bottom-up approaches, are combined into a coherent algorithm to address this problem. Computational experiments on benchmark test sets show that the approach finds the optimal solution for almost all moderately sized instances and outperforms all existing approaches for larger instances.