A hierarchical hyper-heuristic for the bin packing problem

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Abstract
This paper addresses the two-dimensional irregular bin packing problem, whose main aim is to allocate a given set of irregular pieces to larger rectangular containers (bins), while minimizing the number of bins required to contain all pieces. To solve the problem under study a dynamic hierarchical hyper-heuristic approach is proposed. The main idea of the hyper-heuristics is to search the space of low-level heuristics for solving computationally difficult problems. The proposed approach is “dynamic” since the low-level heuristic to be executed is chosen on the basis of the main characteristics of the instance to be solved. The term “hierarchical” is used to indicate the fact that the main hyper-heuristic can execute either simple heuristics or can run in a “recursive fashion” a hyper-heuristic. The developed solution strategy is evaluated empirically by performing extensive experiments on irregular packing benchmark instances. A comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches is also carried out. The computational results are very encouraging.

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