Decorous lower bounds for minimum linear arrangement

Minimum Linear Arrangement is a classical basic combinatorial optimization problem from the 1960s, which turns out to be extremely challenging in practice. In particular, for most of its benchmark instances, even the order of magnitude of the optimal solution value is unknown, as testified by the surveys on the problem that contain tables in which the best known solution value often has one more digit than the best known lower bound value. In this paper, we propose a linear-programming based approach to compute lower bounds on the optimum. This allows us, for the first time, to show that the best known solutions are indeed not far from optimal for most of the benchmark instances

TS2PACK: A Two-Level Tabu Search for the Three-dimensional Bin Packing Problem

Three-dimensional orthogonal bin packing is a problem NP-hard in the strong sense where a set of boxes must be orthogonally packed into the minimum number of three-dimensional bins. We present a two-level tabu search for this problem. The first-level aims to reduce the number of bins. The second optimizes the packing of the bins. This latter procedure is based on the Interval Graph representation of the packing, proposed by Fekete and Schepers, which reduces the size of the search space. We also introduce a general method to increase the size of the associated neighborhoods, and thus the quality of the search, without increasing the overall complexity of the algorithm. Extensive computational results on benchmark problem instances show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, obtaining better results compared to the existing one