A hybrid Harmony search algorithm with variable neighbourhood search for the bin-packing problem

This paper proposes a hybrid Harmony Search algorithm for the bin-packing problem. The bin-packing problem is a well-known NP-Hard optimization problem. The proposed algorithm (called BPHS) combines a harmony search algorithm, that employs a tournament selection in the generation of new candidate solutions, with a variable neighbourhood search to improve the exploitation ability of the algorithm. The BPHS algorithm has been successfully applied to different instances of the bin-packing problem and it is able to find optimal or near-optimal solutions.