Abstract
In this paper, we consider the three-dimensional orthogonal bin packing problem, which is a generalization of the well-known bin packing problem. We present new lower bounds for the problem from a combinatorial point of view and demonstrate that they theoretically dominate all previous results from the literature. The comparison is also done concerning asymptotic worst-case performance ratios. The new lower bounds can be more efficiently computed in polynomial time. In addition, we study the non-oriented model, which allows items to be rotated. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.