Abstract: To improve space utilization of packages,a new approach based on discrete differential evolution algorithm is proposed to solve the two-dimensional rectangular board packing and stacking problem.In the algorithm,a signed sequence is used to denote a solution to the problem and in order to make the best use of gaps,a new lowest horizontal line-gap reuse heuristic is proposed to decode the sub-sequence for a single package,which results in a packing solution to the sub-problem for this package.In order to improve the packing results,an adjacent strategy is also proposed to improve the overall space utilization of each solution.The experimental results show that the algorithm performs better than genetic algorithms when tested by the simulation data and it obtains better space utilization than that of the original packing solutions when tested by the real production data.