As pboin points out, this can be approached in terms of the knapsack problem. But there is a specialization of that, called the bin packing problem, which is simpler and also makes sense here. You can read about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing.
Since I do this fairly frequently, I wrote a module called Algorithm::BinPack to help me solve it. Even if you don't use my module, you might want to take a look at it -- the algorithm it uses has an intuitive simplicity that I really like. (And no, I didn't invent the algorithm, I just codified it into a module.)
