Hybrid genetic approach for 1-D bin packing problem

Abstract

This paper deals with the one-dimensional Bin Packing Problem (1-D BPP). Exact solution methods can only be used for very small instances, hence for real-world problems we have to focus on heuristic methods. In recent years, researchers have started to apply evolutionary approaches to this problem, including Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Programming. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (HGA) to solve 1-D BPP. We compare our approach with algorithms given by Scholl et al., Alvim et al. and Kok-Hua et al. Then we discuss the performance of the approach. We show that giving at least the same performance on term of quality solution, our HGA approach outperforms these algorithms on term of computational time. This performance is due to new mechanisms of hybridisation of genetic algorithms and local search.