State-of-the-art review on 3D bin packing problems

• Main Author: Avataram Venkatavaradan Prituja
• Other Authors: Huang Guangbin
• Format: Thesis-Master by Coursework
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Theory of computation::Analysis of algorithms and problem complexity; Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146004
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Transportation of goods efficiently within containers is one of the significant functions in the supply chain operation. The results are satisfactory if the cost of shipment is optimised, and the customers are satisfied. Thus, the problem of optimising the shipments of goods is essential and dealt with in the literature. Until now, the placement of parcels within the container is done manually in real-world applications. The complexity increases as every parcel are unique with different shapes and dimensions. Similarly, the containers are different for different applications which provide additional constraints to the problem. The literature focuses mostly on the rectangular parcels and is scarce in dealing with irregularly shaped parcels and air cargo loading problems. This dissertation provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art literature related to 3-D bin packing problems. The main purpose is twofold. First, to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the contributions in the literature. Second, to compare the existing literature to the commercially available software applications. Additionally, the work also provides some review related to 2-D irregular parcels as researchers dealing with irregular parcels focus mostly of 2D objects. To summarise the steps to solve this problem, first, it is essential to define the right objective function related to the application. Second, to consider the different constraints related to the parcel and container. Unfortunately, in the literature, most of the authors have simplified the problem and have not considered the real-world constraints. Additionally, various commercially available software applications aim to solve this problem but are not flexible to change the constraints as required. As there are a numerous research in this area and various commercially available software applications, the review only focuses on the recent contributions