Heuristic algorithms for the three-dimensional bin packing problem

The Three-Dimensional Bin Packing Problem (3BP) consists of allocating, without overlapping, a given set of three-dimensional rectangular items to the minimum number of three-dimensional identical finite bins. The problem is NP-hard in the strong sense, and finds many industrial applications. We introduce a Tabu Search framework exploiting a new constructive heuristic for the evaluation of the neighborhood. Extensive computational results on standard benchmark instances show the effectiveness of the approach with respect to exact and heuristic algorithms from the literature. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.