Laboratory Samples Allocation Problem

Abstract

This work aims to solve the optimization problem associated with the allocation of laboratory samples in plates. The processing of each of these plates is costly both in time and money, therefore the main objective is to minimize the number of plates used. The characteristics of the problem are reminiscent of the well-known bin packing problem, an NP-Hard problem that, although it is feasible to model as a linear programming problem, it cannot be solved at a reasonable cost. This work, proposes the implementation of a heuristic algorithm that provides good results at a low computational cost.

Keywords

• optimization
• planning problem
• simulated annealing
• linear programming
• bin packing