A DSS based on optimizer tools and MTS meta-heuristic for the Warehousing Problem with Conflicts

In this paper, we propose a new global warehousing problem supporting advance conflicts: the Warehousing Problem with Conflict (WPC). A predefined number of items, with different weights, are to be loaded into a set of identical warehouses with fixed capacity. The main goal of the WPC is to minimize the overall used number of warehouses under the incompatibility constraint of some pairs of items. We model this optimization problem as a Bin Packing Problem with Conflict (BPPC). As the complexity of the BPPC is NP-Hard, a Multi-start Tabu Search (MTS) is proposed as a solution approach. We also propose a Decision Support System (DSS) based on multi-start the MTS algorithm that performs advanced features in order to well approximate optimal solutions. A comparison to a state-of-the-art approaches is performed and results, with wide variety of instances, showed that the MTS produces considerably better results than the various existing approaches to the detriment of the gap values.