A beam search approach to the container loading problem. Computers and Operations Research, 43(1):100-107, 2014.
doi  abstract   bibtex   
The single container loading problem is a three-dimensional packing problem in which a container has to be filled with a set of boxes. The objective is to maximize the space utilization of the container. This problem has wide applications in the logistics industry. In this work, a new constructive approach to this problem is introduced. The approach uses a beam search strategy. This strategy can be viewed as a variant of the branch-and-bound search that only expands the most promising nodes at each level of the search tree. The approach is compared with state-of-the-art algorithms using 16 well-known sets of benchmark instances. Results show that the new approach outperforms all the others for each set of instances. © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
@article{10.1016/j.cor.2013.09.003,
    abstract = "The single container loading problem is a three-dimensional packing problem in which a container has to be filled with a set of boxes. The objective is to maximize the space utilization of the container. This problem has wide applications in the logistics industry. In this work, a new constructive approach to this problem is introduced. The approach uses a beam search strategy. This strategy can be viewed as a variant of the branch-and-bound search that only expands the most promising nodes at each level of the search tree. The approach is compared with state-of-the-art algorithms using 16 well-known sets of benchmark instances. Results show that the new approach outperforms all the others for each set of instances. © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd.",
    number = "1",
    year = "2014",
    title = "A beam search approach to the container loading problem",
    volume = "43",
    pages = "100-107",
    doi = "10.1016/j.cor.2013.09.003",
    journal = "Computers and Operations Research"
}

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