Packing problems on a PC.

Abstract

Bin packing is a problem with many applications in various industries. This thesis addresses a specific instance of the this problem, known as the Container Packing problem. Special attention is paid to the Pallet Loading problem which is a restricted sub-problem of the general Container Packing problem. Since the Bin Packing problem is NP-complete, it is customary to apply a heuristic measure in order to approximate solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time rather than to attempt to produce optimal results by applying some exact algorithm. Several heuristics are examined for the problems under consideration, and the results produced by each are shown and compared where relevant.