Effective Online 3D Bin Packing with Lookahead Parcels Using Monte Carlo Tree Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Fang, Jiangyi, Zhou, Bowen, Wang, Haotian, Zhu, Xin, Wang, Leye
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Fang, Jiangyi
Zhou, Bowen
Wang, Haotian
Zhu, Xin
Wang, Leye
author_facet Fang, Jiangyi
Zhou, Bowen
Wang, Haotian
Zhu, Xin
Wang, Leye
contents Online 3D Bin Packing (3D-BP) with robotic arms is crucial for reducing transportation and labor costs in modern logistics. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown strong performance, it often fails to adapt to real-world short-term distribution shifts, which arise as different batches of goods arrive sequentially, causing performance drops. We argue that the short-term lookahead information available in modern logistics systems is key to mitigating this issue, especially during distribution shifts. We formulate online 3D-BP with lookahead parcels as a Model Predictive Control (MPC) problem and adapt the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) framework to solve it. Our framework employs a dynamic exploration prior that automatically balances a learned RL policy and a robust random policy based on the lookahead characteristics. Additionally, we design an auxiliary reward to penalize long-term spatial waste from individual placements. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving over 10\% gains under distributional shifts, 4\% average improvement in online deployment, and up to more than 8\% in the best case--demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_02649
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Effective Online 3D Bin Packing with Lookahead Parcels Using Monte Carlo Tree Search
Fang, Jiangyi
Zhou, Bowen
Wang, Haotian
Zhu, Xin
Wang, Leye
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Online 3D Bin Packing (3D-BP) with robotic arms is crucial for reducing transportation and labor costs in modern logistics. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown strong performance, it often fails to adapt to real-world short-term distribution shifts, which arise as different batches of goods arrive sequentially, causing performance drops. We argue that the short-term lookahead information available in modern logistics systems is key to mitigating this issue, especially during distribution shifts. We formulate online 3D-BP with lookahead parcels as a Model Predictive Control (MPC) problem and adapt the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) framework to solve it. Our framework employs a dynamic exploration prior that automatically balances a learned RL policy and a robust random policy based on the lookahead characteristics. Additionally, we design an auxiliary reward to penalize long-term spatial waste from individual placements. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving over 10\% gains under distributional shifts, 4\% average improvement in online deployment, and up to more than 8\% in the best case--demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.
title Effective Online 3D Bin Packing with Lookahead Parcels Using Monte Carlo Tree Search
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02649