The three-dimensional container loading problem

This thesis investigates the three-dimensional container loading problem. We review all literatures published in this area, and explain our unique problem raised from an industry partner. As constructive heuristic remains uncontrollable to us, we design improvement algorithms both to and not to intervene with how constructive heuristic works, namely iterated local search and beam search. New benchmark data sets for multiple containers problem are generated to fill the shortage of challenging data sets. Computational results for homogeneous containers problem indicate that while both approaches work on our problem, beam search remains a favourable choice. We also extend our algorithms to solve heterogeneous containers problem