A heuristic ant colony approach for the circle and rectangle packing problems with rotary inertia constraints

Time-consuming calculations of overlapping areas among objects have become a bottleneck that restricts further improvement of evolutionary algorithms for circle and rectangle packing problems. This paper proposes a heuristic ant colony optimization (HACO) algorithm for the circle and rectangle packing problems with rotary inertia constraints (ICCRPP). The proposed heuristic method is used by artificial ants to construct the feasible layout schemes. Through the ant colony optimization, the optimal layout scheme can be gotten for ICCRPP. Because the introduction of the related layout knowledge in the ordering and positioning rules can make both the envelope radius and rotary inertia of the constructing layout scheme less. The numerical experimental results show that the computational efficiency and solution accuracy of HACO algorithm are satisfactory for ICCRPP.