Bison: A fast hybrid procedure for exactly solving the one-dimensional bin packing problem

In this paper, we consider the well-known one-dimensional bin packing problem (BPP-1), which is to pack a given set of items having different sizes into a minimum number of equal-sized bins. For solving BPP-1, an exact hybrid solution procedure, called BISON, is proposed. It favourably combines the well-known meta-strategy tabu search and a branch and bound procedure based on known and new bound arguments and a new branching scheme. Computational results indicate that BISON is very effective and outperforms existing approaches. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.