Patent ID: 8311971

Claim:
A method for aiding decisions in the batching of items of varying weight, size, shape, or other characterizing features into packs of fixed weight and item count, said method comprising the steps of: controlling the average weight of items used by rejecting a selected portion of an available pool of items according to a calculated “Optimal Usage Curve”, the “Optimal Usage Curve” representing an “overweight of batches” as a function of a “ratio of items used”, the “overweight of batches” representing the average batch weight, and the “ratio of items used” being the number of items used in the batching process over the total number of items in the pool of items, the “Optimal Usage Curve” being obtained by the following steps: a) arranging the items from the pool of items in a queue according to their weight in descending order, b) calculating the average weight of the available pool of items in the queue, the result of the calculating representing a first point in the “Optimal Usage Curve”, c) removing the first item in the available queue pool of items from the calculation and calculating the average weight of the remaining items in the queue, the result of the calculating representing a second point in the “Optimal Usage Curve”, and d) repeating steps b) and c) for the remaining items in the queue and thus the remaining points in the “Optimal Usage Curve” until the queue is empty.