Cardinality constrained bin‐packing problems

We are concerned with a variant of the classical one‐dimensionalbin‐packing problem. n items have to be packed into unit‐capacity bins such that the total number of used bins isminimized with the additional constraint that at most k items can beassigned to one bin. In 1975, Krause et al. analyzed several approximation algorithms forthis problem and showed that they all have an asymptotic worst‐case performance ratioof 2. No better algorithms have been found so far. We present a new heuristic with anasymptotic worst-case bound of 3/2 and O(n log2n)running time.