This is an in-development application that helps pack educational books into boxes for shipping.
Currently, there exists a warehouse that faces a problem whereby their current warehouse management software fails to correctly and efficiently generate a packing list resulting in excessive shipping costs. This issue comes from a bug in the current software whereby it fails to handle packing books of half width side-by-side in a box.
Let's say you have a box that is 30 cm in width, length and height and a book that is 30 cm in length, 15 cm in width and 5 cm in height. If an order was received to pack 12 books, the current system would generate a packing list for two boxes; ignoring the possibility of stacking books side-by-side in the same box:
The desired solution for this would be to instead pack the books side-by-side into a single box since the books should be able to fit beside each-other width wise; the box is 30 cm wide, and the books are each 15 cm wide, allowing two to fit perfectly side-by-side.
The simplified example above defines a shallow scope for the problem. In reality, we have boxes of three heights (40 cm, 60 cm and 80 cm). Their Length and Width are fixed parameters, and the books will always either fit the length and width perfectly or fit the length perfectly and exactly half the size of the box (so that two books can be packed side-by-side).
A small mocked example of the book data was provided in sampleDatabaseMetric.csv. This is assumptively how the application would be receiving the data on the books:
| Item - Number | Item - Name | Height | FW | HW |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Spanish 3 Big Book | 3.05 | FW |
| 6 | Linear Algebra | 6.73 | FW |
| 8 | Data Structures | 6.86 | FW |
| 11 | DVORAK Typing for Dummies | 7.37 | FW |
| 14 | Book of 3.3 Inches | 8.38 | FW |
| 16 | How to use Git | 11.43 | FW |
| 17 | Calculus | 11.94 | FW |
| 1 | Spanish 1 | 1.27 | HW |
| 2 | Spanish 2 | 2.29 | HW |
| 4 | Calculus Answer Key | 3.81 | HW |
| 5 | Everything to Know About Rats & Mice | 4.83 | HW |
| 7 | What OSHA rules really ought to be updated | 6.86 | HW |
| 9 | Agile Manifesto | 6.86 | HW |
| 10 | The 500 ways to use the words "Modus Operandi" in normal conversation | 6.99 | HW |
| 12 | How to Kill Several Mockingbirds | 7.62 | HW |
| 13 | Why test driven development is wrong | 8.13 | HW |
| 15 | Why test driven development is right | 8.64 | HW |
The first column is the item SKU (unique identifier) and should be handled as a string. The next Column is the name of the book followed by its height in centimeters and then finally whether the book is a full width or half width.