TS2PACK: A two-level tabu search for the three-dimensional bin packing problem

Three-dimensional orthogonal bill packing is a problem NP-hard in the strong sense where a set of boxes must be orthogonally packed into the minimum number of three-dimensional bins. We present a two-level tabu search for this problem. The first-level aims to reduce the number of bins. The second optimizes the packing of the bins. This latter procedure is based on the Interval Graph representation of the packing, proposed by Fekete and Schepers, which reduces the size of the search space. We also introduce a general method to increase the size of the associated neighborhoods, and thus the quality of the search, without increasing the overall complexity of the algorithm. Extensive computational results oil benchmark problem instances show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, obtaining better results compared to the existing ones. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.