Evolutionary and Ant Colony Optimization Based Approaches for a Two-Dimensional Strip Packing Problem

In the last few years, metaheuristic approaches have shown an important development in many application areas. This situation has turned them into one of the more appropriate candidates when dealing with difficult real-world problems for which timely, good-quality solutions are necessary. Furthermore, the class of metaheuristic approaches includes a large number of variants and designs which mainly depend on the concepts from which they are inspired. This chapter aims at giving an overview of Evolutionary Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization when applied to the two-dimensional strip packing problem. The respective performance of these two metaheuristics are analyzed and compared from different perspectives by implementing a Genetic Algorithm and an Ant Colony System.

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