Capability of ortools supporting the 3D bin packing problem and visualization

[Mr.Pickle]

Hi there, 

I am wondering if ortools have applications and examples about the 3D bin packing problem? I am facing a problem of planning the loading of thousands of items/boxes/pallets into the ocean containers (mainly 40HC). 

Mannual planning, as most companies currently are doing, is very inefficient and painful. I am very interested to know if there is any ortool-based or other optimization toolkit that helps to solve such problem in a relatively accurate manner.

Allocating the items to containers are relatively easy, as I see from the example: https://developers.google.com/optimization/bin/bin_packing#complete_programs 

What is challenging is to generate a concrete plan telling people how to load each items into a specific container, like which box needs to be placed inside first, which item needs to be placed on top of others, so that the container storage space is maximally utilized.

And I hope to have a visual ouput like below. Are there any good coding examples?

[Laurent Perron]

Please indicate when cross-posting.

The answer is:

  nothing is packaged. We have 2D packing in CP-SAT. Not 3D.

  this is a very hard problem, especially with irregular boxes. You need to decide if you can pack one box on top of others with holes underneath.

  You also need to decide if you can do padding.

I would try to group boxes by heights as much as possible in order to try to solve a sequence of 2D problems.

Laurent Perron | Operations Research | lpe...@google.com | (33) 1 42 68 53 00

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[Mr.Pickle]

our shipment are mainly e-commerce cartons and pallets so the shape of goods is relatively standard and flat. normally we have several different size of boxes. we can merge them as a bigger one and labelled into different colors like above example. is there any good python-based toolkit or algorithem to fast produce a visual solution so that manual check and fine tune can be easily followed?

[Laurent Perron]

OR-Tools is a collection of solver library, not a visualization tool. You are on your own.

Laurent Perron | Operations Research | lpe...@google.com | (33) 1 42 68 53 00

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/or-tools-discuss/21336662-1ca5-4b15-bf50-ed2fb0ce676en%40googlegroups.com.