• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.443-450
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• 2016

This paper deals with a kind of packing problem of which the goal is to compose one or more templates which will be used to produce the items of different types. Each template consists of a fixed number of slots which are assigned to the different types of items and the production of the items is accomplished by printing the template repeatedly. The objective is to minimize the total number of produced items. This problem is known to be NP-hard. We present a polynomial time approximation algorithm which has a constant approximation ratio. The proposed algorithm is based on the well-known first-fit strategy.