Decision Support for Bundle Shipment Choices: Orthogonal Two-dimensional Bin Packing with Practical Constraints

Yizi Zhou, Jiyin Liu, Rupal Mandania, Shuyang Li, Kai Chen, Rongjun Xu

2021

Abstract

In this paper, we study a real life application of an orthogonal two dimensional bin packing problem (2D-BPP) with a small assortment of different shapes of bins and items. A telecommunication equipment company ships its products to customers several times daily by trucks and it currently uses the less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping option which is priced as unit price per volume times the total volume of products. However, depending on scale of products to be shipped, full-truckload (FTL) shipping which is priced as a single price per truck may be cheaper. In this paper we aim to help the company to decide on the delivery choice as well as on how to pack the truck optimally when FTL shipping is selected. We model the problem as a variant of an orthogonal 2D-BPP using mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) with the objective to minimise the total cost of delivery. Practical conditions influencing the feasibility of packing patterns are also considered. Practical guidance such as those on some modelling techniques and the application of the model, are applied to enhance the solving efficiency. The problems are solved by commercial solver CPLEX to optimality up to 34 pallets within an acceptable time. For lager problems, we adopt an approach to combine same items into larger rectangles and then pack them. This increases the solvability to 154 pallets. On average, our method help the company save 26% shipping cost.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Zhou Y., Liu J., Mandania R., Li S., Chen K. and Xu R. (2021). Decision Support for Bundle Shipment Choices: Orthogonal Two-dimensional Bin Packing with Practical Constraints.In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES, ISBN 978-989-758-485-5, pages 161-168. DOI: 10.5220/0010221201610168

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icores21,
author={Yizi Zhou and Jiyin Liu and Rupal Mandania and Shuyang Li and Kai Chen and Rongjun Xu},
title={Decision Support for Bundle Shipment Choices: Orthogonal Two-dimensional Bin Packing with Practical Constraints},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES,},
year={2021},
pages={161-168},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010221201610168},
isbn={978-989-758-485-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES,
TI - Decision Support for Bundle Shipment Choices: Orthogonal Two-dimensional Bin Packing with Practical Constraints
SN - 978-989-758-485-5
AU - Zhou Y.
AU - Liu J.
AU - Mandania R.
AU - Li S.
AU - Chen K.
AU - Xu R.
PY - 2021
SP - 161
EP - 168
DO - 10.5220/0010221201610168