A two-stage packing problem procedure

Abstract

This paper deals with a two-stage packing problem that has to be solved in the daily distribution process of a Portuguese trading company. In the first stage, boxes including goods are to be packed on pallets, while in the second stage these pallets are loaded into one or more trucks. The boxes have to be transported to different customers, and the main goal is to guarantee a sufficient utilization of the truck loading space. A two-stage packing procedure is proposed to cover both problem stages. First, boxes are loaded onto pallets by means of a well-known container loading algorithm. Then, trucks are filled with loaded pallets by a tree search algorithm. The performance of the two-stage approach was evaluated using a set of instances that are based on actual company data.