A Heuristic Algorithm for the Offline One-Dimensional Bin Packing Problem Inspired by the Point Jacobi Matrix Iterative Method

Approximation and online algorithms for multidimensional bin packing: A survey

The bin packing problem is one of the most fundamental optimization problems. Owing to its hardness as a combinatorial optimization problem class and its wide range of applications in different domains, different variations of the problem are emerged and many heuristics have been proposed for obtaining approximate solutions. In this paper, we solve a Multi-Level Bin Packing (MLBP) problem in the real make-to-order industry scenario. Existing solutions are not applicable to the problem due to: 1. the final packing may consist multiple levels of sub-packings; 2. the geometry shapes of objects as well as the packing constraints may be unknown. We design an automatic packing framework which extracts the packing knowledge from historical records to support packing without geometry shape and constraint information. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic programming approach to find the optimal solution for normal size problems; and a heuristic multi-level fuzzy-matching algorithm for large size problems. An inverted index is used to accelerate strategy search. The proposed auto packing framework has been deployed in Huawei Process & Engineering System to assist the packing engineers. It achieves a performance of accelerating the execution time of processing 5,000 packing orders to about $8$ minutes with an average successful packing rate as $80.54%$, which releases at least $30%$ workloads of packing workers.

The more-dimensional bin packing problem (BPP) considered here requires packing a set of rectangular-shaped items into a minimum number of identical rectangular-shaped bins. All items may be rotated and the guillotine cut constraint has to be respected. A straightforward heuristic is presented that is based on a method for the container loading problem following a wall-building approach and on a method for the one-dimensional BPP. 1,800 new benchmark instances are introduced for the two-dimensional and three-dimensional BPP. The instances include more than 1,500 items on average. Applied to these very large instances, the heuristic generates solutions of acceptable quality in short computation times. Moreover, the influence of different instance parameters on the solution quality is investigated by an extended computational study.

In this paper, the NP-complete problem of 1D bin packing is considered. In the 'bin packing problem', a set of numbers or elements that need to be loaded in the bins is considered. The total load of the elements in any bin must not exceed the bin size or bin capacity. These elements must be packed or loaded in the bins in such a way that there is minimum amount of space left in each bin and the number of bins to be used is minimised. A new algorithm, which helps in tackling the bin packing problem, by giving optimal solutions in minimum time, is presented. The algorithms currently in use, requires the elements to be sorted before the loading. The algorithm discussed in this paper avoids the sorting operation before the loading while giving the same best fit results.

Bin Packing Problem (BPP) is a problem that aims to minimize the number of container usage by maximizing its contents. BPP can be applied to a case, such as maximizing the printing of a number of stickers on a sheet of paper of a certain size. Genetic Algorithm is one way to overcome BPP problems. Examples of the use of a combination of BPP and Genetic Algorithms are applied to printed paper in Digital Printing companies. Genetic Algorithms adopt evolutionary characteristics, such as selection, crossover and mutation. Repeatedly, Genetic Algorithms produce individuals who represent solutions. However, this algorithm often does not achieve maximum results because it is trapped in a local search and a case of premature convergence. The best results obtained are not comprehensive, so it is necessary to modify the parameters to improve this condition. Random Crossover and Dynamic Mutation were chosen to improve the performance of Genetic Algorithms. With this application, the performance of the Genetic Algorithm in the case of BPP can overcome premature convergence and maximize the allocation of printing and the use of paper. The test results show that an average of 99 stickers can be loaded on A3 + size paper and the best generation is obtained on average in the 21 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">st</sup> generation and the remaining space is 3,500 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .

In this paper we consider the following bin packing problem with conflicts. Given a set of items V = {1,..., n} with sizes s1,..., s ∈ (0,1) and a conflict graph G = (V, E), we consider the problem to find a packing for the items into bins of size one such that adjacent items (j, j′) ∈ E are assigned to different bins. The goal is to find an assignment with a minimum number of bins. This problem is a natural generalization of the classical bin packing problem. We propose an asymptotic approximation scheme for the bin packing problem with conflicts restricted to d-inductive graphs with constant d. This graph class contains trees, grid graphs, planar graphs and graphs with constant treewidth. The algorithm finds an assignment for the items such that the generated number of bins is within a factor of (1 + ∈) of optimal provided that the optimum number is sufficiently large. The running time of the algorithm is polynomial both in n and in $$\tfrac{1}{\varepsilon}$$ .

The solution of bi-objective bin packing problems with many constraints is of fundamental importance for a wide range of engineering applications such as wireless communication, logistics, or automobile sheet metal forming processes. When the bi-objective bin packing problem is single-constrained, state-of-the-art multi-objective genetic algorithms such as NSGA-II combined with standard constraint handling techniques can be used. In the case of many-constraint bin packing problems, problems with thousand of additional constraints, it is not easy to solve this kind of problem accurately and fast with classical methods. Our approach relies on two key ingredients, NSGA-II and a clustering algorithm in order to generate always feasible solutions independent of the number of constraints. The method allows to tackle bi-objective many-constraint bin packing problems. We will present results for challenging artificial bin packing problems which model typical bi-objective bin packing problems with many constraints arising in the automobile industry.

Summary. The bin packing problem is a fundamental and important optimization problem in theoretical computer science [4], [6]. An instance is a sequence of items, each being of positive size at most one. The task is to place all the items into bins so that the total size of items in each bin is at most one and the number of bins that contain at least one item is minimum. Approximation algorithms have been intensively studied. Algorithm NextFit would be the simplest one. The algorithm repeatedly does the following: If the first unprocessed item in the sequence can be placed, in terms of size, additionally to the bin into which the algorithm has placed an item the last time, place the item into that bin; otherwise place the item into an empty bin. Johnson [5] proved that the number of the resulting bins by algorithm NextFit is less than twice the number of the fewest bins that are needed to contain all items. In this article, we formalize in Mizar [1], [2] the bin packing problem as follows: An instance is a sequence of positive real numbers that are each at most one. The task is to find a function that maps the indices of the sequence to positive integers such that the sum of the subsequence for each of the inverse images is at most one and the size of the image is minimum. We then formalize algorithm NextFit, its feasibility, its approximation guarantee, and the tightness of the approximation guarantee.

Best Fit is a well known online algorithm for the bin packing problem, where a collection of one-dimensional items has to be packed into a minimum number of unit-sized bins. In a seminal work, Kenyon [SODA 1996] introduced the (asymptotic) random order ratio as an alternative performance measure for online algorithms. Here, an adversary specifies the items, but the order of arrival is drawn uniformly at random. Kenyon’s result establishes lower and upper bounds of 1.08 and 1.5, respectively, for the random order ratio of Best Fit. Although this type of analysis model became increasingly popular in the field of online algorithms, no progress has been made for the Best Fit algorithm after the result of Kenyon. We study the random order ratio of Best Fit and tighten the long-standing gap by establishing an improved lower bound of 1.10. For the case where all items are larger than 1/3, we show that the random order ratio converges quickly to 1.25. It is the existence of such large items that crucially determines the performance of Best Fit in the general case. Moreover, this case is closely related to the classical maximum-cardinality matching problem in the fully online model. As a side product, we show that Best Fit satisfies a monotonicity property on such instances, unlike in the general case. In addition, we initiate the study of the absolute random order ratio for this problem. In contrast to asymptotic ratios, absolute ratios must hold even for instances that can be packed into a small number of bins. We show that the absolute random order ratio of Best Fit is at least 1.3. For the case where all items are larger than 1/3, we derive upper and lower bounds of 21/16 and 1.2, respectively.

Some Hybrid Packing Systems integrate several algorithms to solve the bin packing problem (BPP) based on their past performance and the problem characterization. These systems relate BPP characteristics with the performance of the set of solution algorithms and allow us to estimate which algorithm is to yield the best performance for a previously unseen instance. The present paper focuses on the characterization of NP-hard problems. In related work, characterization metrics are traditionally oriented towards problem structure. In this work, we propose metrics based on descriptive statistics for the Bin Packing Problem (BPP). The proposed metrics are of general purpose, meaning that the metrics do not depend on problem structure and can be applied to BPP and other problems to complement existent metrics. The enhanced Hybrid Packing System outperforms the version that does not take advantage of the general-purpose metrics; the results obtained show a 3%-improvement with respect to the reference Packing System.

In the three-dimensional (3D) strip packing problem, we are given a set of 3D rectangular items and a 3D box $B$. The goal is to pack all the items in $B$ such that the height of the packing is minimized. We consider the most basic version of the problem, where the items must be packed with their edges parallel to the edges of $B$ and cannot be rotated. Building upon Caprara's work for the two-dimensional (2D) bin packing problem, we obtain an algorithm that, given any $\epsilon>0$, achieves an approximation of $T_{\infty}+\epsilon\approx1.69103+\epsilon$, where $T_{\infty}$ is the well-known number that occurs naturally in the context of bin packing. Our key idea is to establish a connection between bin packing solutions for an arbitrary instance $I$ and the strip packing solutions for the corresponding instance obtained from $I$ by applying the harmonic transformation to certain dimensions. Based on this connection, we also give a simple alternate proof of the $T_{\infty}+\epsilon$ approximation for 2D bin packing due to Caprara. In particular, we show how his result follows from a simple modification of the asymptotic approximation scheme for 2D strip packing due to Kenyon and Rémila.

In this paper, our objective is to develop a mathematical formulation of solving the Bin Packing Problem (BPP) with different sizes of box. It has become one of the most important mathematical applications throughout the time. In our study, Modified Branch and Bound Algorithm (MBBA) is developed to generate all the feasible packing patterns of given boxes to required containers for One-Dimensional BPP. Further development of algorithms was made to ascertain the locations of each box within the containers by using Cartesian coordinate system. Developed algorithms are coded and programmed in the Python programming environment to generate feasible packing patterns.

We design new exact exponential time algorithms for the well known NP-hard allocation problems- Makespan minimization, the Santa Claus problem (with and without capacity constraints) and the Bin packing problem. These problems are very well-studied in the paradigm of approximation algorithms. However the best known exact, exponential-time algorithms for all of the above problems has complexity of \(O^*(3^m)\) [6], where m is the number of jobs except for Bin Packing which has a \(O^*(2^m)\) inclusion exclusion based algorithm (where m is the number of items) [8]. We introduce a new dynamic programming formulation which helps solve Makespan minimization and Santa Claus problem more efficiently in \(O^*(2^m)\) time and gives a completely different approach with the same time complexity in case of Bin Packing. In addition, Jansen et al. [6] showed that unless the ETH (exponential time hypothesis) is false, there is no exact algorithm that runs in time \(2^{o(m)}\).

Bin packing is a ubiquitous problem that arises in many practical applications. The motivation for the work presented here comes from the domain of data centre optimisation. In this paper we present a parameterisable benchmark generator for bin packing instances based on the well-known Weibull distribution. Using the shape and scale parameters of this distribution we can generate benchmarks that contain a variety of item size distributions. We show that real-world bin packing benchmarks can be modelled extremely well using our approach. We also study both systematic and heuristic bin packing methods under a variety of Weibull settings. We observe that for all bin capacities, the number of bins required in an optimal solution increases as the Weibull shape parameter increases. However, for each bin capacity, there is a range of Weibull shape settings, corresponding to different item size distributions, for which bin packing is hard for a CP-based method.

A study on load-balanced variants of the bin packing problem