An improved algorithm for the packing of unequal circles within a larger containing circle

This paper describes an approved algorithm for the problems of unequal circle packing – the quasi-physical quasihuman algorithm. First, the quasi-physical approach for the general packing problems is described in solving the pure problems of unequal circle packing. The method is an analogy to the physical model in which a number of smooth cylinders are packed inside a container. A quasi-human strategy is then proposed to trigger a jump for a stuck object in order to get out of local minima. Our method has been tested in numerical experiments. The computational results are presented, showing the merits of the proposed method. Our algorithm can be thought as an adoptive algorithm of the Tabu search. 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.