A Constructive Heuristic Algorithm for 3D Bin Packing of Irregular Shaped Items

The three-dimensional bin packing problem (3D-BPP) plays an important role in city logistics and manufacturing environments, due to its direct relevance to operational cost. Most existing literature have investigated the conventional 3D-BPP, in which the shape of items are typically considered as regular shapes, e.g., rectangular-shaped rigid boxes or cylindrical-shaped containers. However, 3D-BPP for non-rectangular shaped items are quite common in varies delivery schemes, especially in fresh food delivery, and few published studies focusing on these issues. In this paper, we address a novel 3D-BPP variant in which the shape changing factor of non-rectangular and deformable items is incorporated to further enhance the loading efficiency and reduce the operational cost of related companies. Motivated by the compression process of item-loading, we propose a constructive heuristic (i.e., an improved dynamic-volume-based packing algorithm) to solve the studied problem. Experimental results over a set of randomly generated instances reveal that considering shape changing factor is indeed able to achieve higher space utilization than that of conventional schemes, thereby has potential to save packaging and delivering cost, as well as enhance operation efficiency.