We give an asymptotic approximation scheme (APTAS) for the problem of packing a set of circles into a minimum number of unit square bins. To obtain rational solutions, we use augmented bins of height @math , for some arbitrarily small number @math . Our algorithm is polynomial on @math , and thus @math is part of the problem input. For the special case that @math is constant, we give a (one dimensional) resource augmentation scheme, that is, we obtain a packing into bins of unit width and height @math using no more than the number of bins in an optimal packing. Additionally, we obtain an APTAS for the circle strip packing problem, whose goal is to pack a set of circles into a strip of unit width and minimum height. These are the first approximation and resource augmentation schemes for these problems. Our algorithm is based on novel ideas of iteratively separating small and large items, and may be extended to a wide range of packing problems that satisfy certain conditions. These extensions comprise problems with different kinds of items, such as regular polygons, or with bins of different shapes, such as circles and spheres. As an example, we obtain APTAS's for the problems of packing d-dimensional spheres into hypercubes under the @math -norm.
In the three-dimensional (3D) strip packing problem, we are given a set of 3D rectangular items and a 3D box @math . The goal is to pack all the items in @math such that the height of the packing is minimized. We consider the most basic version of the problem, where the items must be packed with their edges parallel to the edges of @math and cannot be rotated. Building upon Caprara's work for the two-dimensional (2D) bin packing problem, we obtain an algorithm that, given any @math , achieves an approximation of @math , where @math is the well-known number that occurs naturally in the context of bin packing. Our key idea is to establish a connection between bin packing solutions for an arbitrary instance @math and the strip packing solutions for the corresponding instance obtained from @math by applying the harmonic transformation to certain dimensions. Based on this connection, we also give a simple alternate proof of the @math approximation for 2D ... The three-dimensional packing problem can be stated as follows. Given a list of boxes, each with a given length, width, and height, the problem is to pack these boxes into a rectangular box of fixed-size bottom and unbounded height, so that the height of this packing is minimized. The boxes have to be packed orthogonally and oriented in all three dimensions. We present an approximation algorithm for this problem and show that its asymptotic performance bound is between 2.5 and 2.67. This result answers a question raised by Li and Cheng [5] about the existence of an algorithm for this problem with an asymptotic performance bound less than 2.89.  We study the following packing problem: Given a collection of d-dimensional rectangles of specified sizes, pack them into the minimum number of unit cubes. We show that unlike the one-dimensional case, the two-dimensional packing problem cannot have an asymptotic polynomial time approximation scheme (APTAS), unless PNP. On the positive side, we give an APTAS for the special case of packing d-dimensional cubes into the minimum number of unit cubes. Second, we give a polynomial time algorithm for packing arbitrary two-dimensional rectangles into at most OPT square bins with sides of length 1 , where OPT denotes the minimum number of unit bins required to pack these rectangles. Interestingly, this result has no additive constant term, i.e., is not an asymptotic result. As a corollary, we obtain the first approximation scheme for the problem of placing a collection of rectangles in a minimum-area encasing rectangle. We present an asymptotic (2 + e)-approximation algorithm for the 3D-strip packing problem, for any e > 0. In the 3D-strip packing problem the input is a set L = b 1 , b 2 ,. . ., b n of 3-dimensional boxes. Each box b i has width, length, and height at most 1. The problem is to pack the boxes into a 3-dimensional bin B of width 1, length 1 and minimum height, so that the boxes do not overlap. We consider here only orthogonal packings without rotations; this means that the boxes are packed so that their faces are parallel to the faces of the bin, and rotations are not allowed. This algorithm improves on the previously best algorithm of Miyazawa and Wakabayashi which has asymptotic performance ratio of 2.64. Our algorithm can be easily modified to a (4 + e)-approximation algorithm for the 3D-bin packing problem.