Packing of items into boxes or bins is a recurring task in distribution and production. Concerning the size and shape of items as well as the form and capacity of bins a large variety of different packing problems can be distinguished. Similar problems concern cutting of pieces into particular smaller ones so as to minimize the wastage of material and scheduling of identical parallel processors so as to minimize the total completion time. We consider a basic packing problem which is known as the one-dimensional bin packing problem (BPP-1, cf. Martello and Toth, 1990). It is to pack a given set of items having different sizes into a minimum number of equal-sized bins. Even though this problem seems to be rather simple it is NP-hard, i.e., no procedure is able to solve each problem instance in polynomial time. In order to solve more general (and more complex) realistic problems within reasonable computation time it is important to have on hand effective procedures for the basic problem.