Using a greedy random adaptative search procedure to solve the cover printing problem

In this paper, the cover printing problem, which consists in the grouping of book covers on offset plates in order to minimize the total production cost, is discussed. As the considered problem is hard, we discuss and propose a greedy random adaptative search procedure (GRASP) to solve the problem. The quality of the proposed procedure is tested on a set of reference instances, comparing the obtained results with those found in the literature. Our procedure improves the best known solutions for some of these instances. Results are also presented for larger, randomly generated problems.