A Distributed Computing Model Applied to Combinatorial Optimization Problems base on permutations

The problem addressed here is to orthogonally pack a given set of box shaped items into the minimum number of three-dimensional rectangular and equal bins. The problem is NP Hard in the strong sense and it imposes a great difficulty to solve it in the practice. It is presented a distributed computing approach to solve the problem via genetic algorithms, GA and .. The GA heuristic is a usual genetic algorithm with multiple diversifications amidst the processors while adds a further policy based on intensification to try escaping from eventual local minima. It is imposed in either case that the search occurs just in feasible solution and as an additional constraint it is considered that the resulting boxes packing has to have only configurations with static stability been this latter a very stringent practical difficulty. Extensive computational experiments are reported for instances with up to 90 items and the results are compared with those obtained from the literature