A greedy search for the three-dimensional bin packing problem: the packing static stability case

We suggest a greedy search heuristic for solving the three-dimensional bin packing problem (3D-BPP) where in addition to the usual requirement of minimum amount of bins being used, the resulting packing of items into the bins must be physically stable. The problem is NP-hard in the strong sense and imposes severe computational strain for solving it in practice. Computational experiments are also presented and the results are compared with those obtained by the Martello, Pisinger and Vigo (2000) heuristic.