Packing problems in Transportation and Supply Chain: new problems and trends

Even if packing problems are, from their beginning, strictly linked to Transportation, the recent advances in this field (Smart City, Last Mile integration, City Logistics) and long-term planning of cross-country deliveries are forcing researchers towards a broader definition of them. In particular, while traditionally researchers mainly studied cutting and loading issues, with a special focus on the packing representation and the introduction of packing constraints like guillotine cuts, rotation and incompatibility between items, only recently they have started to consider more general issues as multi-attributes problems, rich packing problems, and uncertainty in the attributes. Aim of this work is to present the relevant literature, showing the different research directions as well as the new perspectives, with a special focus on tactical and strategic problems. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.