Bin-Completion Algorithms for Multicontainer Packing and Covering Problems

Alex S. Fukunaga, Richard E. Korf

Abstract: Bin-completion, a bin-oriented branch-and-bound approach, was recently shown to be promising for the bin packing problem. We propose several improvements to bin-completion that significantly improves search efficiency. We also show the generality of bin-completion for packing and covering problems involving multiple containers, and present bin-completion algorithms for the multiple knapsack, bin covering, and min-cost covering (liquid loading) problems that significantly outperform the previous state of the art. However, we show that for the bin packing problem, bin-completion is not competitive with the state of the art solver.