We study a new variant of the bin packing problem with a color constraint.
Given a finite set of items, each item has a set of colors. Each bin has a
color capacity, the total number of colors for a bin is the unification of
colors for its items and cannot exceed the bin capacity. We need to pack all
items into the minimal number of bins. For this NP-hard problem we present
approximability results and design a hybrid matheuristic based on the column
generation technique. A hybrid VNS heuristic is applied to the pricing
problem. The column generation method provides a lower bound and a core
subset of the most promising bin patterns. Fast heuristics and exact
solution for this core produce upper bounds. Computational experiments for
test instances with number of items up to 500 illustrate the efficiency of the
approach.