Abstract
We investigate a complex stacking problem that stems from storage planning of steel slabs in integrated steel production. Besides the practical importance of such stacking tasks, they are appealing from a theoretical point of view. We show that already a simple version of our stacking problem is PSPACE-complete. Thus, fast algorithms for computing provably good solutions as they are required for practical purposes raise various algorithmic challenges. We describe an algorithm that computes solutions within 5/4 of optimality for all our real-world test instances. The basic idea is a search in an exponential state space that is guided by a state-valuation function. The algorithm is extremely fast and solves practical instances within a few seconds. We assess the quality of our solutions by computing instance-dependent lower bounds from a combinatorial relaxation formulated as mixed integer program. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that provides quality guarantees for such problems.
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König, F.G., Lübbecke, M., Möhring, R., Schäfer, G., Spenke, I. (2007). Solutions to Real-World Instances of PSPACE-Complete Stacking . In: Arge, L., Hoffmann, M., Welzl, E. (eds) Algorithms – ESA 2007. ESA 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4698. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75520-3_64
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75520-3_64
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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