Probabilistic behaviour of optical bin-packing solutions

Abstract The bin-packing problem is studied from a probabilistic view point. It is shown that, when the sizes of the n elements to be packed are drawn independently from a probability distribution F, then the minimum number of bins necessary for the packing of these n elements is asymptotically (a.e.) proportional to n in three cases. In all three cases, the constant of proportionality to n is explicitly given. Furthermore, in two of the cases, a heuristic is described which is asymptotically almost surely closed to the optimal solution.