Cover a Concave Polygon with a minimum number of rectangles
This is a variant of geometric set cover. Depending on the exact settings, you might be able to do some good approximation. The problem is of course NP-Hard. The natural huersitics are to use greedy algorithm (always pick the rectangle/strip that covers the most area not covered yet. The alternative technique is to use reweighing. There are some interesting theoretical results, but frankly, nothing that should be too useful in practice. One interesting hueristic you might want to try, is to first decompose your polygon into minimal number of convex shapes (using Keil dynamic programming algorithm), and then covering each convex polygon separately...