bin packing; Unit Load device; transportation constraints
Abstract :
[en] The subject of this work is to solve the problem of packing a set of shipments (various cuboid boxes) into containers of various shapes without wasting loading space. All the boxes have to be loaded and few are identical. As it is the case for all the packing problems, the packing has to satisfy geometry constraints: the items cannot overlap and have to lie entirely inside the bins. The richness of our application is to manage additional and common constraints: the bin weight capacity, the rotations of the boxes, the stability and the fragility of the boxes and the uniformity of the weight distribution inside the ULDs. The last constraint is crucial in air transportation: when ULDs are packed inside the airplane, the centre of gravity is computed assuming each ULD has a centre of gravity close to the geometrical centre of its basis. This type of constraints can be adapted to road transportation for the axle weight limits, which plays a key role since the weigh-in-motion systems become more common.
