Exhaustive approaches to 2D rectangular perfect packings

In this paper, we consider the two-dimensional rectangular strip packing problem, in the case where there is a perfect packing; that is, there is no wasted space. One can think of the problem as a jigsaw puzzle with oriented rectangular pieces. Although this comprises a quite special case for strip packing, we have found it useful as a subroutine in related work. We demonstrate a simple pruning approach that makes a branch-and-bound-based exhaustive search extremely effective for problems with less than 30 rectangles.