A bin packing problem of the laundry washing buckets scheduling based on the buffer area

In this paper, we consider a class of bin packing problems from the washing reality, which is used to solve the laundry washing buckets scheduling problem in laundry procedure. First, we make some foundation concepts and propose the grouping model of washing buckets scheduling based on BPP-P. The objectives of model are as follow: (1) the buckets with clothes urgency priority are grouped preferentially; (2) the grouping model should make the whole washing tasks finished at the shortest possible. Second, we propose the algorithm of the combination of laundry buckets. Numerical examples results show as follows: (1) the maximum number of one type of clothes in the buffer area play an important role to the effect of the algorithm and the expansion of the buffer area can create more opportunity of combination; (2) because the buckets arrive by batches, the bottleneck resource may change in each group calculation and it may extend the working time of the whole task.