Packing and partitioning problems have many practical applications and have been extensively treated in the literature ([1, 8, 13, 18, 24, 25]). In the last years these problems have received special attention in the area of Combinatorial Optimization.
Some of the results so far obtained, are however, not satisfactory to solve large instances that arise in real world applications. In this respect, investigations of new methods to solve these problems would certainly bring relevant contributions, both from theoretical as well as practical point of view.
It should be mentioned that the participants of this Project have taken part of a long standing cooperation between IME-USP and the participants of ZIB (formerly at the Universität Augsburg), and have experience in the proposed topic, especially in the use of polyhedral combinatorics methods in the design of algorithms to solve NP-hard problems.