A Mixed Approach for Pallet Building Problem with Practical Constraints

We study a pallet building problem that originates from a case study in a company that produces robotized systems for freight transportation and logistics. We generalize the problem by including the concept of family of items, which allows us to consider specific constraints such as visibility and contiguity. We solve the problem with an algorithm based on a two-step strategy: an Extreme Points heuristic is used to group items into horizontal layers and an exact method is invoked to stack layers one over the other to form pallets. The performance of the algorithm is assessed through extensive computational tests on real-world instances. The results show that the exact model considerably increases the solution quality, creating very compact packings with a limited computational effort.