Evolving reusable 3d packing heuristics with genetic programming

Abstract

This paper compares the quality of reusable heuristics designed by genetic programming (GP) to those designed by human programmers. The heuristics are designed for the three dimensional knapsack packing problem. Evolutionary computation has been employed many times to search for good quality solutions to such problems. However, actually designing heuristics with GP for this problem domain has never been investigated before. In contrast, the literature shows that it has taken years of experience by human analysts to design the very effective heuristic methods that currently exist.