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A novel hybrid tabu search approach to container loading

  • Jiamin Liu
    ,
  • Yong Yue
    ,
  • Zongran Dong
    ,
  • Carsten Maple
    ,
  • Malcolm Keech
Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Abstract

The container loading problem, which is significant for a number of industrial sectors, aims to obtain a high space utilisation in the container while satisfying practical constraints. This paper presents a novel hybrid tabu search approach to the container loading problem. A loading heuristic is devised to incorporate heuristic strategies with a handling method for remaining spaces to generate optimal loading arrangements of boxes with stability considered. The tabu search technique, which covers the encoding, evaluation criteria and configuration of neighbourhood and candidate solutions, is used to improve the performance of the loading heuristic. Experimental results with benchmark data show that the hybrid approach provides a better space utilisation than the published approaches under the condition of all loaded boxes with one hundred percent support from below. Moreover, it is shown that the hybrid tabu search can solve problems with the constraints of weight limit and weight distribution with real world data.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 797-807

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

Computers and Operations Research (Volume 38, Issue 4)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 01/04/2011

Publication status

Published - 01/04/2011

ISSN

0305-0548

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/250916
  • Scopus: 78049449795

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