Symmetry-breaking constraints for packing identical rectangles within polyhedra

Two problems related to packing identical rectangles within a polyhedron are tackled in the present work. Rectangles are allowed to differ only by horizontal or vertical translations and possibly 90° rotations. The first considered problem consists in packing as many identical rectangles as possible within a given polyhedron, while the second problem consists in finding the smallest polyhedron of a given type that accommodates a fixed number of identical rectangles. Both problems are modeled as mixed integer programming problems. Symmetry-breaking constraints that facilitate the solution of the MIP models are introduced. Numerical results are presented.