Solving the Problem of Stacking Goods: Mathematical Model, Heuristics and a Case Study in Container Stacking in Ports

Stacking goods or items is one of the most common operations in everyday life. It happens abundantly in not only transportation applications such as container ports, container ships, warehouses, factories, sorting centers, freight terminals, etc., but also computing systems, supermarkets, and so on. We investigate the problem of stacking a sequence of items into a set of capacitated stacks, subject to stacking constraints. In every stack, items …