Arc-flow Vector Packing Solver (VPSolver)

Copyright (C) 2013, Filipe Brandão
Faculdade de Ciencias, Universidade do Porto
Porto, Portugal. All rights reserved. E-mail: <fdabrandao@dcc.fc.up.pt>.

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VPSolver is a vector packing solver based on an arc-flow formulation with graph 
compression.  VPSolver generates very strong models (equivalent to Gilmore and 
Gomory's) that can be solved using general-purpose mixed-integer programming 
solvers such as Gurobi and GLPK. VPSolver does not explicitly require any MIP 
solver in particular, though a good  MIP solver may be necessary for solving 
large models.

For more details, please refer to the manual.

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Project Homepage: http://code.google.com/p/vpsolver/
GitHub Mirror: https://github.com/fdabrandao/vpsolver
Bitbucket Mirror: https://bitbucket.org/fdabrandao/vpsolver

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Requirements:
    MIP solver: Gurobi, CPLEX, GLPK, COIN-OR, lp_solve, ...
    Compiler: g++ >= 4.6
    Python 2.7 for the python interface (optional)

It has been successfully compiled and run on the following platforms: 
    Linux
    Mac OS X 

Compiling VPSolver: ./compile.sh

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VPSolver includes several scripts for solving arc-flow models using different 
solvers:
    scripts/vpsolver_coinor.sh  - COIN-OR CBC Solver
    scripts/vpsolver_cplex.sh   - IBM CPLEX
    scripts/vpsolver_glpk.sh    - GLPK
    scripts/vpsolver_gurobi.sh  - Gurobi
    scripts/vpsolver_lpsolve.sh - lp_solve

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VPSolver includes several examples:
    examples/example.sh - shell commands
    examples/example.py - usage examples of pyvpsolver (the python interface)
    examples/example_vbp.py - solves vector packing instances using pyvpsolver
    examples/example_mvbp.py - solves multiple-choice vector packing instances
    examples/example_vsbpp.py - solves variable-sized bin packing instances

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Folders:    
    bin/        - vpsolver executables
    scripts/    - vpsolver scripts
    src/        - vpsolver source code in C++
    pyvpsolver/ - pyvpsolver source code in Python 2.7
    examples/   - vpsolver and pyvpsolver examples
    reports/    - technical reports on the underlying algorithms and models    

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VPSolver was proposed in:
Brandão, F. and Pedroso, J. P. (2013). Bin Packing and Related Problems: 
General Arc-flow Formulation with Graph Compression. Technical Report 
DCC-2013-08, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Universidade do 
Porto, Portugal. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6887

See also:
Brandão, F. and Pedroso, J. P. (2013). Multiple-choice Vector Bin Packing:
Arc-flow Formulation with Graph Compression. Technical Report DCC-2013-13, 
Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Universidade do Porto, Portugal.

Brandão, F. and Pedroso, J. P. (2013). Cutting Stock with Binary Patterns: 
Arc-flow Formulation with Graph Compression. Technical Report DCC-2013-09, 
Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Universidade do Porto, Portugal.

Brandão, F. (2012). Bin Packing and Related Problems: Pattern-Based Approaches. 
Master’s thesis, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Portugal.

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Computational results on several benchmark test data sets: 
http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~fdabrandao/research/vpsolver/results/

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Filipe Brandão's Homepage: http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~fdabrandao/