Three Dimensional Container Packing of Drums and Pallets

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 found to increase the average utilisation of the containers. In some cases the heuristic eliminated freight which had been sent as loose cargo by fitting the entire loose cargo into the current number of containers. An analysis of the drum sizes used in the problems found that some sized drums caused large inefficiencies. Some of the drums required small reductions in their diameter to allow for even higher container space utilisation.