Hey Sean,
I’m just brainstorming, and I may start working on this on the side, but here’s what I had in mind. Most companies that ship any volume of products use standard size boxes. Whatever sizes those may be, that company uses 3 or 4 “standard” boxes and they make products fit within those boxes. It speeds things up to just buy boxes from a company like U-Line so that you don’t have to make a custom box every time.
So it’s a two fold problem.
1) Create an input to allow users to input the size of the boxes they’re using.
2) Create a (or use an existing) 3D box packing algorithm to pack items in three dimensions into the minimal number of box sizes specified by the user.
This is the kind of system that UPS, USPS, and FedEx all use in their respective API’s as far as I know. It’s known as the Bin Packing Problem. Shoot me an email if you want too and we can talk about it. contact (at) blacktagdesign.com
Cheers!
