MULTIDISCIPLINARY THEMES
ALCIDES N. SIAL AND VALDEREZ P. FERREIRA (ORGANIZER)
EFFICIENT ALGORITHMS FOR PACKING BOXES INTO CONTAINER
SOSTENES L. S. LINS
Departamento de Matemática, CCEN, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil.
The problem of packing boxes into bigger boxes (containers) is a practical problem which, by its economical significance, deserves a serious and inspired scientific approach. From a strictly mathematical point of view, it is an incredibly challenging problem which badly needs good heuristics to solve it. We have been involved in trying to find such heuristics since 1997. These heuristics use new concepts in graph theory (the tets), in data structure (the phormas), and used some classical algorithms as topological sorting and the coding of combinatorial objects to approach real world packing problems. A distinguished feature of our approach is the visual treatment of the spatial packing: we produce a sequence of homogeneous increments (a loading plan) in the packings which makes it easy to visualize and to actually produce the solutions found.
We have produced a set of effective heuristics for dealing with real world box packing problems: we permit various types of boxes, various types of containers, demand requirements on the boxes and the information on which box types can change its vertical direction. The implementation of our heuristics produces very good packings as compared with non-scientific ones: typically we put 7% to 12% more boxes. The full paper related to these matters is scheduled to be published this year (2002) in the European Journal of Operations Research.
A computer package named ExpedPlex is under development, where the pertinent algorithms are being efficiently implemented. (May 24, 2002).
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
09 Oct 2002 -
Date of issue
Sept 2002
