An efficient algorithm for solving the Arbitrary Sized Circle Packing Problem

This paper studies the Arbitrary Sized Circle Packing Problem (ACP) which concerns how to pack a number of arbitrary sized circles into a circular container without overlap. As a classical NP-hard problem, ACP is scientifically challenging and is widely encountered in practical applications. Based on an efficient local optimization method, several perturbation strategies are implemented for jumping out of local optima, and an acceptance rule is developed to strengthen the robustness of the proposed approach. Computational experiments show that the proposed approach produces competitive results with respect to the best known results reported by previous literature.