The min-conflict packing problem

Abstract

In the classical bin-packing problem with conflicts (BPC), the goal is to minimize the number of bins used to pack a set of items subject to disjunction constraints. In this paper, we study a new version of BPC: the min-conflict packing problem (MCBP), in which we minimize the number of violated conflicts when the number of bins is fixed. In order to find a tradeoff between the number of bins used and the violation of the conflict constraints, we also consider a bi-objective version of this problem. We show that the special structure of its Pareto front allows to reformulate the problem as a small set of MCBP. We solved these two problems through heuristics, column-generation methods, and a tabu search. Computational experiments are reported to assess the quality of our methods.