A MIP approach for some practical packing problems: Balancing constraints and tetris-like items

This paper considers packing problems with balancing conditions and items consisting of clusters of parallelepipeds (mutually orthogonal, i.e. tetris-like items). This issue is quite frequent in space engineering and a real-world application deals with the Automated Transfer Vehicle project (funded by the European Space Agency), at present under development. A Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) approach is proposed. The threedimensional single bin packing problem is considered. It consists of orthogonally placing, with possibility of rotation, the maximum number of parallelepipeds into a given parallelepiped. A MIP formulation of the problem is reported together with a MIP-based heuristic approach. Balancing conditions are furthermore examined, as well as the orthogonal placement (with rotation) of tetris-like items into a rectangular domain. Key words: packing, balancing conditions, tetris-like items, mixed integer programming, MIP-based heuristic approach AMS Classification: 90B99, 05B...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: 4OR
• Authors: Giorgio Fasano
• Keywords: 4OR 2004, Integer Programming, MIP-based Heuristic Approach, Tetris-like Items