Ranking lower bounds for the bin-packing problem

In this paper, we evaluate different known lower bounds for the bin-packing problem including linear programming relaxation (LP), Lagrangean relaxation (LR), Lagrangean decomposition (LD) and the Martello-Toth (MT) [Martello, S., Toth, P., Knapsack Problems: Algorithms and Computer Implementations, Wiley, New York, 1990] lower bounds. We give conditions under which Lagrangean bounds are superior to the LP bound, show that Lagrangean decomposition (LD) yields the same bound as Lagrangean relaxation (LR) and prove that the MT lower bound is a Lagrangean bound evaluated at a finite set of Lagrange multipliers; hence, it is no better than the LR and LD lower bounds. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.