Abstract
We excavate the wisdom from an old Chinese proverb “gold corner, silver side and strawy void”, and further improve it into “maximum value in diamond cave” for solving the NP-hard cuboid packing problem. We extract, integrate and formalize the idea by west modern mathematical tools, and propose a pure quasi-human algorithm. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on two sets of public benchmarks. For 100 strongly heterogeneous difficult benchmarks, experiments show an average packing utilization of 87.31%, which surpasses current best record reported in the literature by 1.83%. For 47 difficult benchmarks without orientation constraint, experiments show an average volume utilization of 92.05%, which improves current best record reported in the literature by 1.05%.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Scholl A, Klein R, Jürgens C. BISON: a fast hybrid procedure for exactly solving the one-dimensional bin packing problem. Comput Oper Res, 1997, 24: 627–645
Bischoff E E, Ratcliff M S W. Issues in the development of approaches to container loading. OMEGA: Int J Manag Sci, 1995, 23(4): 377–390
Moura A, Oliveira J F. A GRASP approach to the containerloading problem. IEEE Intell Syst, 2005, 20(4): 50–57
Lim A, Rodrigues B, Wang Y. A multi-faced buildup algorithm for three-dimensional packing problems. OMEGA: Int J Manag Sci, 2003, 31(6): 471–481
Gehring H, Bortfeldt A. A genetic algorithm for solving the container loading problem. Int Trans Oper Res, 1997, 4: 401–418
Bortfeldt A, Gehring H. A tabu search algorithm for weakly heterogeneous container loading problems (in German). OR Spectrum, 1998, 20(4): 237–250
Bortfeldt A, Gehring H. A hybrid genetic algorithm for the container loading problem. Eur J Oper Res, 2001, 131: 143–161
Gehring H, Bortfeldt A. A parallel genetic algorithm for solving the container loading problem. Int Trans Oper Res, 2002, 9(4): 497–511
Loh T H, Nee A Y C. A packing algorithm for hexahedral boxes. In: Proc Conf Ind Automat, Singapore, 1992. 115–126
Huang W Q, Xu R C. Two personification strategies for solving circles packing problem (in Chinese). Sci China Ser E, 1999, 29(4): 347–353
Huang W Q, Xu R C. Introduction to the Modern Theory of Computation — Background, Foreground and Solving Method for the NP-hard Problem (in Chinese). Beijing: Science Press, 2004. 47–70
Huang W Q, Zhan S H. A quasi-physical method for solving packing problems (in Chinese). J Appl Math, 1979, 2(2): 176–180
Huang W Q, Zhan S H. A quasi-physical method of solving packing problems. Math Rev, 1982, 82h: 52002
Davies A P, Bischoff E E. Weight distribution considerations in container loading. Eur J Oper Res, 1999, 114: 509–527
Beasley J E. OR-Library: distributing test problems by electronic mail. J Oper Res Soc, 1990, 41(11): 1069–1072
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 60773194), the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2004CB318000), and Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 20070420174)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Huang, W., He, K. A pure quasi-human algorithm for solving the cuboid packing problem. Sci. China Ser. F-Inf. Sci. 52, 52–58 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-009-0005-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-009-0005-0