A Hybrid Simulated Annealing/Linear Programming Approach for the Cover Printing Problem

Abstract

The NP-hard cover printing problem addressed here consists in determining the number and composition of equal size impression grids, as well as the number of times each grid is printed, in order to fulfill the demand of different book covers at minimum total printing cost. The considered costs come from printing sheets and for composing grids. Thus, to deal with this combinatorial optimization problem we investigated two heuristics: one combines simulated annealing and linear programming techniques and the other is a hybrid of Tabu Search and an ad hoc procedure. Through intensive testing on available instances, these algorithms proved to be superior to previous approaches.

Management and Production Engineering Review

“…Some authors proposed heuristics (Li et al, 2017;Burger et al, 2015;De Antón et al, 2020;Chergui et al, 2018) and metaheuristics (Alonso-Pecina and Romero, 2018;Elaoud et al, 2007) for solving production planning problem. The usage of data for industrial process intelligence is of growing significance on the road to organizational excellence.…”

“…Some studies presented the printing problem such as job splitting (Ekici et al, 2010), advertisement printing (Mohan et al, 2007, label printing (Hsieh and You, 2014;Yiu et al, 2007), the napkin printing (Frits and Bertok, 2020), the book cover printing problem (Alonso-Pecina and Romero, 2018;Elaoud et al, 2007;Tuyttens and Vandaele, 2010;Romero and Alonso-Pecina, 2012) and color printing (Burger et al, 2015).…”

Two heuristics for the label printing problem

“…The authors stated the problem in their study and proposed a hybrid algorithm between simulated annealing and simplex algorithm to solve CPP up to eight covers. Some other approaches include genetic algorithms, greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP), and ad hoc heuristics (see Elaoud et al., 2007; Ekici et al., 2010; Tuyttens and Vandaele, 2010; Romero and Alonso‐Pecina, 2012; Tuyttens and Vandaele, 2014; Alonso‐Pecina and Romero, 2018).…”