Mr Matthew Bland

Office: 721 |

Honours thesis

Amphibious assault planning: two-dimensional bin packing with rotation and priority

During a military operation, transportation is often effected via sea. In the final stages of such a landing, equipment is transported from a vessel to land via so called landing craft. The idea is for all of the equipment to arrive at the landing zone as quickly as possible. This can be done by finding an optimal packing solution for the landing craft, hence making the craft do as few trips as possible. But what if some items of equipment are required at the landing zone earlier than others? In other words, how does time-dependent priority fit into the optimal packing solution? In this thesis, we will show how this can be modeled as a two-dimensional bin packing problem, which can then be represented as a formal mixed integer linear program and solved by usual formal linear programming methods. We also show how it can be solved by more computationally-efficient heuristic methods.