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A hybrid GRASP/VND algorithm for two- and three-dimensional bin packing

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Abstract

The three-dimensional bin packing problem consists of packing a set of boxes into the minimum number of bins. In this paper we propose a new GRASP algorithm for solving three-dimensional bin packing problems which can also be directly applied to the two-dimensional case. The constructive phase is based on a maximal-space heuristic developed for the container loading problem. In the improvement phase, several new moves are designed and combined in a VND structure. The resulting hybrid GRASP/VND algorithm is simple and quite fast and the extensive computational results on test instances from the literature show that the quality of the solutions is equal to or better than that obtained by the best existing heuristic procedures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain

    F. Parreño

  2. Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of Valencia, Burjassot, Valencia, Spain

    R. Alvarez-Valdes & J. M. Tamarit

  3. Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    J. F. Oliveira

  4. INESC Porto—Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores do Porto, Porto, Portugal

    J. F. Oliveira

Authors
  1. F. Parreño
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  2. R. Alvarez-Valdes
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  3. J. F. Oliveira
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  4. J. M. Tamarit
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Correspondence to R. Alvarez-Valdes.

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Parreño, F., Alvarez-Valdes, R., Oliveira, J.F. et al. A hybrid GRASP/VND algorithm for two- and three-dimensional bin packing. Ann Oper Res 179, 203–220 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-008-0449-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-008-0449-4

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