A GRASP ALGORITHM FOR THE CONTAINER LOADING PROBLEM WITH MULTI-DROP CONSTRAINTS

This paper studies a variant of the container loading problem in which to the classical geometric constraints of packing problems we add other conditions appearing in practical problems, the multi-drop constraints. When adding multi-drop constraints, we demand that the relevant boxes must be available, without rearranging others, when each drop-off point is reached. We present first a review of the different types of multi-drop constraints that appear in literature. Then we propose a GRASP algorithm that solves the different types of multi-drop constraints and also includes other types of realistic constraints such as full support of the boxes and load bearing strength. The computational re…