Show HN: A Modern Palletization App

Ah! That's a pretty much orphan subject yet the world is constantly moving pallets.

For pallet stability you would like to have a convex perimeter so the stretch wrapping maintains the boxes effectively. And also criss-crossing boxes for shear resistance.

But you need to align as much boxes corners as possible to get vertical stiffness.

A solver proposing stacking patterns with these constraints would be outstanding.

Looks great! If you did do something related to truck fill, would be great to see if it could be generalised to 3D bin packing.

I’m currently working a free / open source warehouse management system so great to see other people working on supply chain problems!

Stuff like this is great.

Fast moving consumer goods is a vastly underrated represented technology sector, they do so much cool stuff that just goes completely unnoticed.

I started my first job in a warehouse and it really gave me a good look at the proprietary technology powering day to day life. It should be more open but few work on stuff like this.

I've had some friends in the logistics industry ask about a mobile app for this. How hard would it be to convert that to mobile? Are you depending on some complex libraries for the solver, or did you implement the algorithm yourself? I have 0 to no knowledge of C#.

I suppose this would be useful for large supply chains. Once you get away from that and move to shipping from warehouse to store, though, this would be a largely be a waste of time. Stacking a pallet with various different sized boxes and shapes is a bit of an art form that is largely learned through trial and error until you "get" it (I was on a full time night stock crew while I was in college). It would literally take more time for workers to refer to the layout than it would for them to simply stack the goods onto the pallet.

Just lasted 2 days moving pallets barrels and cylinders. I needed the customers to accept non-full 300 lb barrels instead of the full 500 lb. Couldn't do it. Pallets and wrapping were to load a bit easier but often we cut the shrink wrap at the first stop and the pallet had stuff for like 3 stops. Seems like the shrink wrap was practical to keep stuff from flying around but also regulatory, cops could write a ticket.

Thanks for this! We ditched our Tops Pallet software a year ago and have been looking for something similar. Where can we donate to the development?

Amazing job, love seeing native apps like this rather than webapps. Keep it up!

Robot palletizers use such algorithms, but do humans need a program for this?

Another case of "Machines should think. People should work."

I tried to make some sort of joke or pun based off of shipping containerized software, I couldn't make it work. Oh well.

Only thing I think it needs is the option to change the UOM from metric to imperial.

Not something I have a use for, but that's pretty cool.

here's my alternative 3d bin packer https://3dpack.ing

The humble pallet is the red blood cell of civilization.

There's a ton of really cool optimization ideas like this in Industrial Engineering - factory production schedule optimizations, path optimizations, lots of knapsack problems. What a treat that there are people willing to pay for this kind of work.