Effective Neighborhood Operators for Solving the Flexible Demand Assignment Problem

Rather than dealing with the traditional one-dimension bin packing problem to minimize the cost in demand assignments, the flexible demand assignment (FDA) problem studied in this paper considers the balance between revenue and cost. Compared with a number of solution methods in operations research, we solve the FDA problem by three specially designed operators of neighborhood construction for search space-namely, One Bin Repack, Two Bins Repack, and Unpack. Extensive computational results clearly show the superiority of the three proposed operators based on simple local search over the best published results.