A Hybrid Simulated Annealing/Linear Programming Approach for the Cover Printing Problem

The NP-hard cover printing problem addressed here consists in determining the number and composition of equal size impression grids, as well as the number of times each grid is printed, in order to fulfill the demand of different book covers at minimum total printing cost. The considered costs come from printing sheets and for composing grids. Thus, to deal with this combinatorial optimization problem we investigated two heuristics: one combines simulated annealing and linear programming techniques and the other is a hybrid of Tabu Search and an ad hoc procedure. Through intensive testing on available instances, these algorithms proved to be superior to previous approaches.