SUMMARY
Cutting and packing problems are combinatorial optimisation problems. In mostmanufacturing situations a raw material, usually in some standard size, has to be divided orcut into smaller items to complete the production of some product. It is therefore desirablethat this raw material be used efficiently. A novel placement heuristic, hybridised with agenetic algorithm, is presented in this paper. A general solution encoding scheme, which isused to encode two dimensional strip packing problems, is also introduced in this study.