A two‐stage packing procedure for a Portuguese trading company

This case study deals with a two-stage packing problem that has to be solved in thedaily distribution process of a Portuguese trading company. At the first stage boxesincluding goods are to be packed on pallets while at the second stage these pallets areloaded into one or more trucks. The boxes have to be transported to different customersand the actual goal is to guarantee a sufficient utilization of the truck loading spaces. Atwo-stage packing procedure is proposed to cover both problem stages. First boxes areloaded onto pallets using a well-known container loading algorithm. Then trucks arefilled with loaded pallets by means of a new tree search algorithm. The applicability andperformance of the two-stage approach was evaluated with a set of instances that arebased on actual company data.