A multi-level filling heuristic for the multi-objective container loading problem

Abstract

This work deals with a multi-objective formulation of the Container Loading Problem which is commonly encountered in transportation and wholesaling industries. The goal of the problem is to load the items (boxes) that would provide the highest total volume and weight to the container, without exceeding the container limits. These two objectives are conflicting because the volume of a box is usually not proportional to its weight.Most of the proposals in the literature simplify the problem by converting it into a mono-objective problem. However, in this work we propose to apply multi-objective evolutionary algorithms in order to obtain a set of non-dominated solutions, from which the final users would choose the one to be definitely carried out. To apply evolutionary approaches we have defined a representation scheme for the candidate solutions, a set of evolutionary operators and a method to generate and evaluate the candidate solutions. The obtained results improve previous results in the literature and demonstrate the importance of the evaluation heuristic to be applied.