Title
On the Use of Equivalence Classes for Optimal and Suboptimal Bin Packing and Bin Covering
Abstract
Bin packing and bin covering are important optimization problems in many industrial fields, such as packaging, recycling, and food processing. The problem concerns a set of items, each with its own value, that are to be sorted into bins in such a way that the total value of each bin, as measured by the sum of its item values, is not above (for packing) or below (for covering) a given target value. The optimization problem concerns minimizing, for bin packing, or maximizing, for bin covering, the number of bins. This is a combinatorial NP-hard problem, for which true optimal solutions can only be calculated in specific cases, such as when restricted to a small number of items. To get around this problem, many suboptimal approaches exist. This article describes the formulations of the bin packing and covering problems that allow finding the true optimum, for instance, counting hundreds of items using general-purpose MILP-solvers. Also presented are suboptimal solutions that come within less than 10% of the optimum while taking significantly less time to calculate, even ten to 100 times faster, depending on the required accuracy.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TASE.2020.3022986
IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Combinatorial mathematics,integer linear programming,mathematical programming,optimization,sorting
Journal
18
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1545-5955
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sabino Francesco Roselli132.40
Fredrik Hagebring210.71
Sarmad Riazi3256.54
Martin Fabian420427.91
Knut Åkesson530233.72