Space defragmentation for packing problems
Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews › RGC 21 - Publication in refereed journal › peer-review
Author(s)
Related Research Unit(s)
Detail(s)
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 452-462 |
Journal / Publication | European Journal of Operational Research |
Volume | 222 |
Issue number | 3 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2012 |
Link(s)
Abstract
One of main difficulties of multi-dimensional packing problems is the fragmentation of free space into several unusable small parts after a few items are packed. This study proposes a defragmentation technique to combine the fragmented space into a continuous usable space, which potentially allows the packing of additional items. We illustrate the effectiveness of this technique using the two- and three-dimensional bin packing problem, where the aim is to load all given items (represented by rectangular boxes) into the minimum number of identical bins. Experimental results based on well-known 2D and 3D bin packing data sets show that our defragmentation technique alone is able to produce solutions approaching the quality of considerably more complex meta-heuristic approaches for the problem. In conjunction with a bin shuffling strategy for incremental improvement, our resultant algorithm outperforms all leading meta-heuristic approaches based on the commonly used benchmark data by a significant margin. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Research Area(s)
- 2D/3D bin packing, Bin shuffling, Comparability graph, Packing, Space defragmentation, Visibility graph
Citation Format(s)
Space defragmentation for packing problems. / Zhu, Wenbin; Zhang, Zhaoyi; Oon, Wee-Chong et al.
In: European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 222, No. 3, 01.11.2012, p. 452-462.
In: European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 222, No. 3, 01.11.2012, p. 452-462.
Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews › RGC 21 - Publication in refereed journal › peer-review