An integer-programming-based heuristic for the balanced loading problem

This paper presents an efficient heuristic algorithm for the one-dimensional loading problem in which the goal is to pack homogeneous blocks of given length and weight in a container in such a way that the center of gravity of the packed blocks is as close to a target point as possible. The proposed algorithm is based on the approximation of this problem as a knapsack problem. This algorithm has the same computational complexity but a better worst-case performance than the algorithm recently proposed by Amiouny et al. Moreover, the computational results also show that, in general, it performs better on randomly generated problems.