Offline green bin packing and its constrained variant

Abstract

In this paper, we study the {\em green bin packing} (GBP) problem where $\beta \ge 0$ and $G \in [0, 1]$ are two given values as part of the input. The energy consumed by a bin is $\max \{0, \beta (x-G) \}$ where $x$ is the total size of the items packed into the bin. The GBP aims to pack all items into a set of unit-capacity bins so that the number of bins used plus the total energy consumption is minimized. When $\beta = 0$ or $G = 1$, GBP is reduced to the classic bin packing (BP) problem. In the {\em constrained green bin packing} (CGBP) problem, the objective is to minimize the number of bins used to pack all items while the total energy consumption does not exceed a given upper bound $U$. We present an APTAS and a $\frac 32$-approximation algorithm for both GBP and CGBP, where the ratio $\frac 32$ matches the lower bound of BP. Keywords: Green bin packing; constrained green bin packing; approximation scheme; offline algorithms