Weight distribution in container loading: a case study

This work addresses a real‐world problem proposed by a Portuguese company. Every day this company needs to define a plan to pack a set of boxes onto a single truck. The truck will have to make as many trips as necessary to deliver the entire set of boxes. In the literature, this is known as the bin‐packing problem. As this is a real‐world application, practical constraints, such as load stability and box orientation constraints, weight limit of the truck, and uniform distribution of weight inside the truck, should be ensured. To solve this problem, we propose a constructive heuristic based on a layer arrangement approach that comprises a corner selection strategy for placing the boxes. Some experiments are conducted with the company's data, and the quality of the solutions is evaluated regarding the occupancy rates and distribution of the cargo weight inside the truck.