A study on the quadratic multiple container packing problem

The container packing problem is one of the traditional optimization problems, which is very related to the knapsack problem and the bin packing problem. In this paper, we deal with the quadratic multiple container packing problem (QMCPP) and it is known as a NP-hard problem. Thus, it seems to be natural to use a heuristic approach such as evolutionary algorithms for solving the QMCPP. Until now, only a few researchers have studied on this problem and some evolutionary algorithms have been proposed. This paper introduces a new efficient evolutionary algorithm for the QMCPP. The proposed algorithm is devised by improving the original network random key method, which is employed as an encoding method in evolutionary algorithms. And we also propose local search algorithms and incorporate them with the proposed evolutionary algorithm. Finally we compare the proposed algorithm with the previous algorithms and show the proposed algorithm finds the new best results in most of the benchmark instances.