External memory in a hybrid ant colony system for a 2D strip packing

Abstract

In this paper we present a study of an Ant Colony System (ACS) for the two-dimensional strip packing problem. In our computational study, we emphasize the influence of incorporating an external memory, which store partial packing patterns, regarding solution quality and execution times. The stored partial solutions are used by the ants in the construction of their solutions to provide further exploitation around potential solutions. We show that our external memory based ACS algorithm to the 2SPP was able to devise solutions of quality comparable to that of those reported by an existing ACS but exhibiting low execution times.