Heuristics approaches for the industrial Storage Problem

Abstract

We investigate a real Storage Problem (SP) defined by the Tunisian company. It requires finding the minimum number of bins to pack all the available items (mattresses). Each item has a different sizes (width, height, length) and characteristics (ranges, colors, quantity). The problem is interpreted as Three-Dimensional Variable-Sized Bin Packing Problem (3D-VSBPP). Two heuristics are presented based on Best-Fit Decreasing (BFD) and Next-Fit decreasing (NFD) strategy. Those heuristics are analyzed in case; the number of bins is unlimited. The proposed approaches are analyzed on a real data with up to 9344 items and two bins types.