A hybrid GRASP/VND algorithm for two- and three-dimensional bin packing

The three-dimensional bin packing problem consists of packing a set of boxes into the minimum number of bins. In this paper we propose a new GRASP algorithm for solving three-dimensional bin packing problems which can also be directly applied to the two-dimensional case. The constructive phase is based on a maximal-space heuristic developed for the container loading problem. In the improvement phase, several new moves are designed and combined in a VND structure. The resulting hybrid GRASP/VND (greedy randomized adaptive search procedures (GRASP), variable neighborhood descent (VND) ) algorithm is simple and quite fast and the extensive computational results on test instances from the literature show that the quality of the solutions is equal to or better than that obtained by the best existing heuristic procedures.