Local Search For The Bin Packing Problem

The bin packing problem consists in nding the minimum number of bins of given capacity which are necessary to pack a certain number of itens. In this work, we propose an improvement procedure for the bin packing problem, based on the progressive reduction of the number of bins used by a previously constructed solution. Since bin eliminations often lead to unfeasible solutions, a local search feasibility operator based on the diierencing method for number partition is used. Encouraging computational results on benchmark instances are reported.