Micro-IPLS: pallet loading on a microcomputer

Abstract IPLS is an interactive computerized system developed in 1982 to assist the U.S. Air Force with pallet loading. It uses a dynamic programming based heuristic to solve the two-dimensional problem of loading a rectangular pallet from a set of n rectangular boxes so as to maximize the area covered. Micro-IPLS is a version of IPLS that has been developed recently using Apple Fortran on an Apple II + microcomputer with 64k. This paper discusses the underlying heuristic used by Micro-IPLS and compares its performance to the results obtained by the latest version of IPLS.