A Combinatorial Packing Algorithm and Standard Trunk Geometry for ISO Luggage Packing

Paper in proceeding, 2012

Automated packing algorithms for luggage compartments in automobiles are of great interest. The difficulty of automatically computing the volume of a mesh representation of a boot according to the ISO 3832 standard restricts the design of vehicles required to meet minimal trunk volume specifications and also increases the cost of physical and virtual verification of the original design specifications. In our paper we present a new heuristic combinatorial packing algorithm for the ISO luggage packing standard. The algorithm presents numerous advantages over previous algorithms in terms of its simplicity and speed as well as producing high density of packed objects. The algorithm also solves the problem of requiring a fixed grid structure to position discrete objects in the boot and can also be used as an additional optimization on existing algorithms. In addition, we also provide the first comparison of state of the art packing algorithms for a simplified trunk geometry and propose a standard trunk geometry to enable future researchers to compare their results with other packing algorithms.