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Virginia Tech

Asymptotic Worst-Case Analyses for the Open Bin Packing Problem

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

The open bin packing problem (OBPP) is a new variant of the well-known bin packing problem. In the OBPP, items are packed into bins so that the total content before the last item in each bin is strictly less than the bin capacity. The objective is to minimize the number of bins used. The applications of the OBPP can be found in the subway station systems in Hong Kong and Taipei and the scheduling in manufacturing industries. We show that the OBPP is NP-hard and propose two heuristic algorithms instead of solving the problem to optimality. We propose two offline algorithms in which the information of the items is known in advance. First, we consider the First Fit Decreasing (FFD) which is a good approximation algorithm for the bin packing problem. We prove that its asymptotic worst-case performance ratio is no more than 3/2. We observe that its performance for the OBPP is worse than that of the BPP. Consequently, we modify it by adding the algorithm that the set of largest items is the set of last items in each bin. Then, we propose the Modified First Fit Decreasing (MFFD) as an alternative and prove that its asymptotic worst-case performance ratio is no more than 91/80. We conduct empirical tests to show their average-case performance. The results show that in general, the FFD and MFFD algorithms use no more than 33% and 1% of the number of bins than that of optimal packing, respectively. In addition, the MFFD is asymptotically optimal when the sizes of items are (0,1) uniformly distributed.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Ph. D.
Level thesis:degree_level
doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2005

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Ongkunaruk, Pornthipa
Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Chan, Lap Mui Ann
  • Lin, Kyle Y.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Sarin, Subhash C.
  • Anderson-Cook, Christine M.
  • Bish, Ebru K.

Subjects

dc:subject × 3

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
etd-12152005-230125
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/30105

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Ongkunaruk, Pornthipa. Asymptotic Worst-Case Analyses for the Open Bin Packing Problem. doctoral thesis, Virginia Tech, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/30105