A Look-Ahead-Based Heuristic for Packing Spheres into a Bin: The Knapsack Case

In this work, we propose a heuristic for packing spheres into a three-dimensional bin of fixed dimensions. The objective is to maximize the volume occupied by the packed spheres. The proposed heuristic is based on a new idea that implements a two-stage look-ahead method. The computational results, conducted on a set of instances taken from the literature, show that the proposed method is effective since it improves or matches the majority of the best known solutions.