A Hybrid Simulated Annealing Algorithm for Container Loading Problem

This paper presents a hybrid simulated annealing algorithm for container loading problem with boxes of different sizes and single container for loading. A basic heuristic algorithm is introduced to generate feasible solution from a special structure called packing sequence. The hybrid algorithm uses basic heuristic to encode feasible packing solution as packing sequence, and searches in the encoding space to find an approximated optimal solution. The computational experiments on 700 weakly heterogeneous benchmark show that our algorithm outperforms all previous methods in average.