A hybrid heuristic for packing unequal circles into a circular container

Recently, we have developed two heuristics for the circle packing problem. The first one is called Maximum Hole Degree (MHD) and was used for packing unequal circles into a rectangular and a circular container. The second heuristic is called Minimum Damage (MinD) and is particularly adapted for packing equal circles into a circular container. MHD obtains good results when the instances contain very varied circles (different radii) but its performances decrease when there are more and more equal circles in the instances. In this paper, we propose a hybrid heurisctic named Null-Damage-MHD (NDMHD) used for packing unequal circles into a circular container. NDMHD combines MinD and MHD heuristics and we show that the obtained heuristic is adapted for every kind of circle instances.