This comprehensive work explores the research performed inoptimization of the collection bin and in recycle bin location-allocation issues in solidwaste management. Although the collection phase of solid waste management accountsfor a significant proportion of the municipal budget, it has attracted only limitedattention of the researchers. Optimization of the collection bin and recycle bin loca...

An instance of the classical bin packing problem consists of a positive real C and a list L = (a1, a2, ..., an) of items with sizes 0 < s(ai) ≤ C, 1 ≤ i ≤ n; a solution to the problem is a partition of L into a minimum number of blocks, called bins, such that the sum of the sizes of the items in each bin is at most the capacity C. The capacity is just a scaling parameter; as is customary, we pu...

In the bin covering problem, the goal is to fill as many bins as possible up to a certain minimal level with a given set of items of different sizes. Online variants, in which the items arrive one after another and have to be packed immediately on their arrival without knowledge about the future items, have been studied extensively in the literature. We study the simplest possible online algori...

We introduce a subclass of NP optimization problems which contains some NP-hard problems, e.g., bin covering and bin packing. For each problem in this subclass we prove that with probability tending to 1 (exponentially fast as the number of input items tends to in)nity), the problem is approximable up to any chosen relative error bound ¿ 0 by a deterministic )nite-state machine. More precisely,...