Vector bin packing with heterogeneous bins: application to the machine reassignment problem

International audienceIn this paper, we introduce a generalization of the vector bin packing problem, where the bins have variable sizes. This generalization can be used to model virtual machine placement problems and in particular to build feasible solutions for the machine reassignment problem. We propose several families of greedy heuristics for this problem and show that they are flexible and can be adapted to handle additional constraints. We present structural properties of the machine reassignment problem, that allow us to decompose it into smaller subproblems and adapt our heuristics to them. We evaluate our heuristics on academic benchmarks of the vector bin packing problem, a randomly generated vector bin packing problem with heterogeneous bins benchmark as well as Google’s realistic instances of the machine reassignment problem