Packing arbitrary three-dimensional objects

sparrow-3d is a nesting algorithm designed to tackle 3D irregular strip packing problems.

In such problems, the goal is to place a set of 3D irregular items inside a rectangular container of fixed width and depth, while minimising the height of the container. It is based on and intended to closely match the strategy of sparrow algorithm as described in "Gardeyn et al. (2025) An open-source heuristic to reboot 2D nesting research".

General information

Our C++ implementation relies on the MeshCore library for loading files, rendering and providing the necessary collision detection methods. The project use uses CMake as its build system. We recommend using vcpkg as a package manager to install the dependencies that are defined in the vcpkg.json file. To set up a development environment, we refer to the vcpkg documentation.

CMake targets

• StripPacking_Fixed_Rotation: Run sparrow-3d on a single instance, no rotation of the items considered.

• StripPacking_Discrete_Rotation: Run sparrow-3d on a single instance, a discrete number of rotations allowed.

• Benchmark_Fixed_Rotation: Benchmark sparrow-3d on a set of instances, without item rotation.

• Benchmark_Discrete_Rotation: Benchmark sparrow-3d on a set of instances, with discrete item rotations.

• Render_Item_Poles: Render the poles of inaccessibility of a given item.

• Render_Solution_Poles: Render the poles of inaccessibility for an entire solution.