  The Variable Sized Bin Packing Problem has a wide range of application areas
including packing, scheduling, and manufacturing. Given a list of items and
variable sized bin types, the objective is to minimize the total size of the
used bins. This problem is known to be NP-hard. In this article, we present two
new heuristics for solving the problem using a new variation of P systems with
active membranes, which we call a hybrid P system, implemented in CUDA. Our
hybrid P-system model allows using the polarity and labels of membranes to
represent object properties which results in reducing the complexity of
implementing the P-system. We examine the performance of the two heuristics,
and compare the results with those of other known algorithms. The numerical
results show that good solutions for large instances (10000 items) of this
problem could be obtained in a very short time (seconds) using our CUDA
simulator.

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing