A simple and effective decomposition for the multidimensional binpacking constraint

Abstract

The multibin-packing constraint captures a fundamental substructure of many assignment problems, where a set of items, each with a fixed number of dimensions, must be assigned to a number of bins with limited capacities. In this work we propose a simple decomposition for multibin-packing that uses a bin-packing constraint for each dimension, a set of all-different constraints automatically derived from a conflict graph, plus two alternative symmetry breaking approaches. Despite its simplicity, the proposed decomposition is very effective on a number of instances recently proposed in the literature. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.