A Tabu Search Algorithm for the 3D Bin Packing Problem in the Steel Industry

This paper presents a tabu search and best-fit decreasing (BFD) algorithms to address a real-world steel cutting problem from a retail steel distributor. It consists of cutting large steel blocks in order to obtain smaller tailored blocks ordered by clients. The problem is addressed as a cutting & packing problem, formulated as a 3-dimensional residual bin packing problem for minimization of stock variation. The performance of the proposed approaches is compared to an heuristic and ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms. The proposed algorithms were able to reduce the stock variation by up to 179%. The comparison of results between the tabu search and BFD algorithm shows that a multiple order joint analysis benefits the optimization of the addressed objective.