| The field of product packing is a mature and very rich field of research. However the majority of previous research focuses on heuristic approaches to solving packing problems due to high problem complexity and difficulty in obtaining optimality using exact techniques. One branch of this field is the Container Loading Problem (CLP) which has received its share of study but with little applicable results outside of suboptimal heuristic approaches.;This research focuses on modeling and solving the CLP by focusing on three aspects of this field: enhancing and extending existing exact solution methodologies, introducing a new modeling and solution paradigm, Constraint Programming, which has the potential to overcome some of the traditionally difficult to address aspects of the problem, and finally a comprehensive and unbiased methodology to evaluate model performance in order to identify the best models for the various problem classes. |
