NEW COMPUTER SOFTWARE FROM NASA 
CARGO PACKING

PACKMAN, from NASA Marshall Space Center, is a computer program used to
find near-optimal arrangements of cargo items in storage containers,
subject to multiple packing objectives such as container volume
utilization, container weight limit utilization, and other considerations.
As the number and complexity of these constraints grows to more than a
few, human experts may have difficulty or fail in finding near-optimal
solutions. PACKMAN allows users to specify a single rectangular container
of arbitrary length, width and height, along with a set of cargo items,
each of arbitrary rectangular dimensions and with specified
characteristics, to attempt to pack into the container. The user is also
allowed to specify the criteria for packing and the degree of importance
placed on each criterion.

PACKMAN, inventory number MFS-28700, is written in Common LISP for
Macintosh computers running System 6.0.3 or higher, and requires Macintosh
Allegro Common Lisp version 1.3.2 for execution. This program will not run
under Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp version 2.0 without modification.
PACKMAN requires 4Mb of RAM and 1Mb of disk space. The PACKMAN source code
uses Xerox's Portable Common Loops object-oriented LISP extensions, with
permission from Xerox. All source code for the PACKMAN program is included
(source code for Portable Common Loops, however, is not provided). The
standard distribution medium for PACKMAN is a set of two 3.5 inch 800K
Macintosh diskettes. An electronic copy of the documentation in Microsoft
Word format is included on the distribution media. Program $250;
documentation $16.

COSMIC, The University of Georgia
382 East Broad St, Athens, GA 30602-4272
(706) 542-3265;  Fax: (706) 542-4807

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