I just received the excellent news that the paper that I wrote in collaboration with Wei Lijun, Zhu Wenbin and my boss Andrew Lim has been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Operational Research. Woot!
This paper had by far the smoothest acceptance procedure out of all the journal papers I have ever written. The reviewer comments came back 3 months after submission with a major revision. It took us a couple of weeks to address the issues, and it took another month for the official acceptance to come through. That's four and a half months from the start of writing to a new line on my CV. :D
It's probably no coincidence that this paper is one of the most straightforward. It deals with the rectangle packing problem, which essentially asks how you can pack a bunch of small rectangles into a bigger rectangle as much as possible. Our main contribution is a heuristic, which is a fancy word for "rules of thumb". Basically, it decides where to place a small rectangle using a number of rules, such as "don't put it too high" and "don't put it where it creates a lot of wasted space where no other small rectangle can fit". We then try the small rectangles in many different orders, and pick the best result. Turns out it works pretty well.
The details are slightly more complicated, and we also deal with another related problem called strip packing, but you get the picture; it's not exactly rocket surgery. On the other hand, it is simple enough for the average software engineer to actually program and use, unlike some of the more complicated papers with lots of math and Greek symbols.
Sometimes, simple really is best. :)
For those of you who actually want to read the paper, it's called "A Skyline Heuristic for the 2D Rectangular Packing and Strip Packing Problems". I'll put a link to it in the Selected Publications page on my website as soon as we get the final proof.
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