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Multidimensional Bin Packing Revisited

  • Conference paper
Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8124))

Abstract

Multidimensional bin packing is a challenging combinatorial problem with applications to cloud computing, virtualized datacenters, and machine reassignment. In contrast to the classical bin packing model, item sizes and bin capacities both span a vector of values, requiring that feasible assignments honor capacity constraints across all dimensions. Recent work has yielded significant improvements over traditional CP and MIP encodings by incorporating multivalued decision diagrams (MDDs) into a heuristic-driven CSP-based search. In this paper, we consider a radically different approach to multidimensional bin packing, in which the complete contents of bins are considered sequentially and independently. Our algorithm remains depth-first, yet adopts a powerful least commitment strategy for items when their exclusion from a bin is attempted. We abandon the use of MDDs, and instead aggregate capacity over incomplete bins to establish significantly stronger bounds on the solution quality of a partial assignment. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to four orders of magnitude, and can even solve some previously intractable problems within a fraction of a second.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Corp., USA

    Michael D. Moffitt

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  1. Michael D. Moffitt
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Communication Technology, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, P.O. Box Forum 120, 16440, Kista, Sweden

    Christian Schulte

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Moffitt, M.D. (2013). Multidimensional Bin Packing Revisited. In: Schulte, C. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8124. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40627-0_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40627-0_39

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40626-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40627-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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