Article ID: | iaor2006812 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 32 |
Issue: | 8 |
Start Page Number: | 2051 |
End Page Number: | 2058 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2005 |
Journal: | Computers and Operations Research |
Authors: | Chang Soo Y., Hwang Hark-Chin, Park Sanghyuck |
Keywords: | combinatorial analysis, heuristics |
We consider the problem of efficiently packing steel products, known as coils, into special containers, called cassettes, for shipping. The objective is to minimize the number of cassettes used for packing all the given coils where each cassette has capacity limits on both total payload weight and size. We model this problem as a two-dimensional vector packing problem and propose a heuristic. We also analyze the worst-case performance of the proposed algorithm under a special condition which, in fact, holds for the particular real-world case that we handled. Our computational experiment with real production data shows that the proposed algorithm performs quite satisfactorily in practice.