Industrial Picking and Packing Problem: Logistic Management for Products Expedition

The picking and packing problem is one of the considerable importance problems in logistics and widely arises in many industrial engineering applications. This paper investigates a single container picking and pack problem, which aims to pick a set of equal-dimensions boxes and pack them into a single container such that the utility of the boxes is maximized while the weight constraint of the container is satisfied. The problem considered in this study is formulated as a zero-one Knapsack Problem (0/1 KP). Due to the NP-hardness of the 0/1 KP problem, an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is proposed. Then to improve approximate solution quality, a new heuristic information is proposed based on problem-specific knowledge. The experimental outcomes show that the developed ACO algorithm is capable of solving the problem even with two hundred boxes efficiently, whilst requiring the same amount of computational effort.