Decision support for packing in warehouses

Abstract

Packing problems deal with loading of a set of items (objects) into a set of boxes (containers) in order to optimize a performance criterion under various constraints. With the advance of RFID technologies and investments in IT infrastructures companies now have access to the necessary data that can be utilized in cost reduction of packing processes. Therefore bin packing and container loading problems are becoming more popular in recent years. In this research we propose a beam search algorithm to solve a packing problem that we encountered in a real world project. The 3D-MBSBPP (Multiple Bin Sized Bin Packing Problem) that we present and solve has not been analyzed in literature before, to the best of our knowledge. We present the performance of our proposed beam search algorithm in terms of both cost and computational time in comparison to a greedy algorithm and a tree search enumeration algorithm. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.