CHaMP: Creating Heuristics via Many Parameters

The online bin packing problem is a well-known bin packing variant which requires immediate decisions to be made for the placement of a sequence of arriving items of various sizes one at a time into fixed capacity bins without any overflow. The overall goal is maximising the average bin fullness. We investigate a ‘policy matrix’ representation which assigns a score for each decision option independently and the option with the highest value is chosen for one dimensional online bin packing. A policy matrix might also be considered as a heuristic with many parameters, where each parameter value is a score. We hence investigate a framework which can be used for creating heuristics via many parameters. The proposed framework combines a Genetic Algorithm optimiser, which searches the space of heuristics in policy matrix form, and an online bin packing simulator, which acts as the evaluation function. The empirical results indicate the success of the proposed approach, providing the best solutions for all item sequence generators used during the experiments.