SPL

SPL - The Single Polybag Loading Problem

• Yuxin Che, Ying Liu, Qiang Gao, Andrew Lim, Qian Hu*. The single polybag loading problem. EURO/ALIO International Conference 2018 on Applied Combinatorial Optimization (EURO/ALIO 2018), Bologna, June 25-27, 2018.

Fulltext will be available in Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics.

• Yuxin Che, Ying Liu, Qiang Gao, Andrew Lim, Qian Hu. The single polybag loading problem. Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics. 2018, 69: 69-79. DOI

Conference presentation slides is attached.

Abstract

In the logistics industry, not only cartons but also polybags are used to pack goods for delivery. We study a single polybag loading problem, which is faced by many e-retailers and courier companies. In the problem, a set of rotatable boxes and a two-dimensional rectangular polybag are given. Because the polybag is flexible, the three-dimensional space inside the polybag can be variable when the boxes are loaded. The problem is to choose a subset of the boxes and pack them orthogonally into the polybag so as to maximize the space utilization. We introduce a mixed integer programming formulation and propose a tree search heuristic for the problem. Methods are evaluated by computational experiments on randomly generated data.

Test Data

Real data from industry is not available due to privacy agreements.

Random generated data will be updated.