Abstract: The attractive factor approach, which is one of the location function approach, has
gotproduces better results in the packing problems. This paper researches the attractive factor
approach and gets some basic properties of it as follows: Such as the 3D image of the location
function is a plane, the points with equal values of the location function are on the same straight
line, the rectangular items are piled in a corner by the attractive factor approach, and so on. In
addition, a manual rapid-packing method is given by studying the geometry significance of the
pack-in point. In the end, the property which is about the of being an invisible attractive factor is
obtained by studying the effect of the position of the attractive factors.

Key words: packing problem, heuristic algorithms, location function, attractive factor
approach