Towards an efficient resolution of printing problems

This paper addresses two different problems coming from the printing industry: the label printing problem and the cover printing problem. In both cases, the problem consists in the assignment of a fixed number of labels on different templates in order to fulfill the printing requirements and to minimize the waste of excessive printed labels in the first case or to minimize the total production cost in the second case. In these problems, allocating suitable labels to each template is a strategical task to improve the efficiency of the printing process. As the considered problems are hard, we propose a new GRASP algorithm to solve these problems. The proposed algorithm is tested on some reference instances, comparing the obtained results with those found in the literature. The results prove that the GRASP algorithm is particularly well suited to these problems.