Title
Packing a Trunk
Abstract
We report on a project with a German car manufacturer. The task is to compute (approximate) solutions to a specific large-scale packing problem. Given a polyhedral model of a car trunk, the aim is to pack as many identical boxes of size 4 x 2 x 1 units as possible into the interior of the trunk. This measure is important for car manufacturers, because it is a standard in the European Union. First, we prove that a natural formal variant of this problem is NP-complete. Further, we use a combination of integer linear programming techniques and heuristics that exploit the geometric structure to attack this problem. Our experiments show that for all considered instances, we can get very close to the optimal solution in reasonable time.
Year
DOI
Venue
2003
10.1007/978-3-540-39658-1_56
ALGORITHMS - ESA 2003, PROCEEDINGS
Keywords
Field
DocType
polyhedral model
Combinatorics,Packing problems,Polyhedron,Greedy algorithm,Integer programming,Linear programming,Polytope model,Mathematics,Trunk,European union
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
2832
0302-9743
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.75
9
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Friedrich Eisenbrand172653.74
stefan funke270657.45
joachim reichel31206.22
Elmar Schömer437937.50
Giuseppe Di Battista52298361.48
Uri Zwick63586257.02