In this work, we deal with the problem of packing (orthogonally and without overlapping) identical rectangles in a rectangle. This problem appears in different logistics settings, such as the loading of boxes on pallets, the arrangements of pallets in trucks and the stowing of cargo in ships. We present a recursive partitioning approach combining improved versions of a recursive five-block heur...

The Total Colouring Conjecture suggests that ∆ + 3 colours ought to suffice in order to provide a proper total colouring of every graph G with maximum degree ∆. Thus far this has been confirmed up to an additive constant factor, and the same holds even if one additionally requires every pair of neighbours in G to differ with respect to the sets of their incident colours, so called pallets. With...

In multi-station assembly systems, common for mass-customization manufacturing strategies, the product being assembled is held in a fixture attached to a pallet, and the pallet is conveyed between workstations. In high-precision assembly systems, variation in the position of the pallet is one of the largest sources of variation within the error budget, reducing quality and yields. Conventional ...

A manufacturer of electrical cable needs to pack drums and pallets of cable into standard shipping containers for exporting overseas. Packing is done in such a way as to minimise the number of containers used. A three dimensional packing heuristic is developed to solve this problem. The packing plans prepared manually were compared to the plans obtained from the heuristic. The heuristic was fou...

We study the combinatorial FIFO Stack-Up problem, where bins have to be stacked-up from conveyor belts onto pallets. This is done by palletizers or palletizing robots. Given k sequences of labeled bins and a positive integer p, the goal is to stack-up the bins by iteratively removing the first bin of one of the k sequences and put it onto a pallet located at one of p stack-up places. Each of th...

Given the huge number of products transported worldwide every day, it would be advantageous to use lightweight pallets made readily recyclable materials that are easy clean, durable, and cheap maintain. However, design process for new metal does not follow any specific code, which makes transition with improved characteristics more challenging. This paper describes development a modular steel p...

Wood pallets play a critical role in the movement and storage of goods worldwide. They are an important component complex global supply chain used by almost every industry. It is therefore to assess environmental implications wood pallet identify optimization strategies that can be implemented. In this paper, primary 2018 annual production data collected from U.S. manufacturers were develop fir...