Improving energy efficiency and lowering operational costs are the main challenges faced in systems with multiple servers. One prevalent objective in such systems is to minimize the number of servers required to process a given set of tasks under server capacity constraints. This objective leads to the well-known bin packing problem. In this study, we consider a generalization of this problem with a time dimension, where the tasks are to be performed with prede fined start and end times. This new dimension brings about new performance considerations, one of which is the uninterrupted utilization of servers. This study is motivated by the problem of energy efficient assignment of virtual machines to physical servers in a cloud computing service. We address the virtual machine placement problem and present a binary integer programming model to develop different assignment policies. By analyzing the structural properties of the problem, we propose an efficient heuristic method based on solving smaller versions of the original problem iteratively. Moreover, we design a column generation algorithm that yields a lower bound on the objective value, which can be utilized to evaluate the performance of the heuristic algorithm. Our numerical study indicates that the proposed heuristic is capable of solving large-scale instances in a short time with small optimality gaps.
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