A 2D-BPP instance consists of a list N of
rectangular items with dimensions
,
for all ∈
and a list of bins with dimensions
,
for
all ∈ and cost
for all ∈. It is known as a
strongly NP-hard problem and is also in practice very
difficult to solve (Garey and Johnson, 1979; Martello
and Vigo, 1998). Solution algorithms for 2D-BPP can
be classified into three types, exact algorithms,
heuristics and metaheuristics, with many literatures
devoted to the improvement on lower bounds
provided by heuristics (Lodi, 2002). Lodi (2017)
proposed a heuristic algorithm for 2D-BPP with no
rotation allowed based on enumeration tree. Each
level of the tree represents the current content for the
pth bin in the solution. In particular, each bin is filled
by applying a packing strategy that packs one item at
a time according to a given selection rule and
guillotine split rule. The selection rule determines the
next item to pack (and its position in the bin), whereas
the guillotine split rule is used to ensure the produced
pattern being guillotinable. The tree is pruned using a
depth-first strategy. This heuristic can solve many
benchmark problems to optimality and yield near
optimal solution for other cases. Cui (2017) presented
a construction heuristic to solve the 2D-BPP problem
in three phases. The first phase generates triple-block
patterns, the second phase uses some of the patterns
to construct solutions, and the third phase solves an
ILP problem to improve the solutions. The gap to LB
is reduced by 30% compared to some best known
algorithms on some test instances. In this paper, we
also implement n-block patterns to speed up the
solution for our MIP model. Buljubašić and Vasquez
(2016) proposed a tabu search algorithm with a
consistent neighborhood search approach to solve the
1D-BPP and 2D-VPP problems and yield best-known
solutions for all benchmark test instances they used.
The bins available are infinite, they start with
1 bins, where UB is an upper bound obtained
by using a variant of the classical First Fit heuristic.
LB and UB will be input for our implementation of
the mathematical model presented in this paper.
Pisinger and Sigurd (2007) studied an exact algorithm
branch-and-price-and-cut for 2D-BPP. The master
problem is formulated as a set covering problem
where each set represents a feasible packing. All
feasible packings (sets) could be large and the model
will have much more columns than rows (variables
than constraints), so column generation is applied to
gradually add sets. Each restricted master problem is
solved using dual simplex method. In each iteration
of column generation, a pricing problem is solved by
finding the set with smallest reduced cost to be added.
Problems with pp to n=100 items are solved to
optimality through this algorithm. Polyakovskiy and
M’Hallah (2020) combined two difficult discrete
optimisation problems: BPP and machine scheduling
and model the problem as an integrated constraint
program with two sets of constraints, bin packing
feasibility and single machine scheduling constraints
respectively. They also proposed two decompositions
approaches, a master problem is a relaxation of BPP
and then validate the solutions by row generations.
Their results show that an integrated model
outperforms the decomposition approaches. We will
study an integrated model in this paper.
To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first
to consider the combined problem of bundle shipment
or shipment selections and 2D-BPP with rotations.
We introduce a new mathematical formulation for the
integrated problem with practical constraints and
discuss how to improve the solving efficiency from a
model formulation point of view. The model is
currently being used by a large telecommunication
service company and it has helped the company to
save shipment cost.
3 MATHEMATICAL MODEL
There are normally three different problem
representations for BPP: coordinates (Christofides
and Whitlock, 1977), sequence pairs (Murata et al.,
1995) and graphs (Lins et al., 2002). We use the first
one as different graph representations can lead to the
same arrangement adding complexity for search
algorithms. We need to decide on: partition (
),
order position
,
, orientation
and relative
position
,
,
,
. The detailed definition of
notation is shown in section 3.1. Although we assume
the number of trucks is unlimited, the mathematical
model needs an initial value of the number of each
types of trucks. We could use a sufficiently large
number of trucks but it will lead to much larger model
than necessary and longer computational times. So
we will use the lower bound generated from literature
of heuristics as the starting point for the number of
trucks available for the math model.
There is an obvious lower bound on the number
of trucks, which is the sum of area of squares divided
by the area of truck floor:
∑
∈
/
. In
many cases,
can be inadequate for an effective
use for the exact algorithm. Several better bounds are
provided by Martello and Vigo (1998). In this paper,
we will use
for simplicity reason.