Mathematical models based on decision hypergraphs for designing a storage cabinet

Abstract

We study the problem of designing a cabinet made up of a set of shelves that contain compartments whose contents slide forward on opening. Considering a set of items candidate to be stored in the cabinet over a given time horizon, the problem is to design a set of shelves and a set of compartments on each shelf, and select the items to insert into the compartments. The objective is to maximize the sum of the profits of the selected items. We call our problem the Storage Cabinet Physical Design (SCPD) problem. The SCPD problem combines a two-staged two-dimensional knapsack problem for designing the shelves and compartments with a set of temporal knapsack problems for selecting and assigning items to compartments. We formalize the SCPD problem and formulate it as a maximum cost flow problem in a decision hypergraph with additional linear constraints. To reduce the size of this model, we break symmetries, generalize graph compression techniques and exploit dominance rules for precomputing subproblem solutions. We also present a set of valid inequalities to improve the linear relaxation of the model. We empirically show that solving the arc-flow model with our enhancements outperforms solving a compact mixed integer linear programming formulation of the SCPD problem.