Approximation Algorithms for a Hierarchically Structured Bin Packing

In this paper we study a variant of the bin packing problem in which the items to be packed are structured as the leaves of a tree. The problem is motivated by document organization and retrieval. We show that the problem is NP-hard and we give approximation algorithms for the general case and for the particular case in which all the items have the same size. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.