STABILITY ASPECTS OF PALLET LOADING

The algorithm-orientated literature on packing problems has concentrated on methods for achieving an efficient utilisation of the transport or storage medium concerned. Many problems arising in practice, however, also involve other objectives in addition to that of minimising unused space. The stability of the load is a prime example. The paper considers the stability objective in the context of pallet loading and examines approaches for generating stable stacking patterns that are also optimal from the viewpoint of space utilisation. A statistical performance analysis of the methods described is presented and potentially fruitful directions for further research are discussed.