Evolutionary based heuristic for bin packing problem

In this paper, we investigate the use of evolutionary based heuristic to the one-dimensional bin packing problem (BPP). Unlike other evolutionary heuristics used with optimization problems, a non-specialized and non-hybridized algorithm is proposed and analyzed for solving BPP. The algorithm uses a modified permutation with separators encoding scheme, unique concept of separators' movements during mutation, and separators removal as a technique of problem size reduction. The set of experiments confirmed that the proposed approach is comparable to much more complicated algorithms. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.