In this paper, a new type of 3D bin packing problem (BPP) is proposed, in
which a number of cuboid-shaped items must be put into a bin one by one
orthogonally. The objective is to find a way to place these items that can
minimize the surface area of the bin. This problem is based on the fact that
there is no fixed-sized bin in many real business scenarios and the cost of a
bin is proportional to its surface area. Our research shows that this problem
is NP-hard. Based on previous research on 3D BPP, the surface area is
determined by the sequence, spatial locations and orientations of items. Among
these factors, the sequence of items plays a key role in minimizing the surface
area. Inspired by recent achievements of deep reinforcement learning (DRL)
techniques, especially Pointer Network, on combinatorial optimization problems
such as TSP, a DRL-based method is applied to optimize the sequence of items to
be packed into the bin. Numerical results show that the method proposed in this
paper achieve about 5% improvement than heuristic method.

本文提出一种新型三维装箱问题，利用深度强化学习算法中的 Pointer Network 方法来优化装箱物品的序列，以期在不固定大小容器的场景下，通过最小化表面积来减少容器成本。数值结果显示该方法较启发式方法改进了约 5%。