Shifting Strategy Based Heuristic Algorithm for Solving Equal Circle Packing Problems

This paper delves into the Equal Circle Packing problem, aiming to explore how to fill a given two-dimensional square container with as many unit-radius circular objects as possible while ensuring that there is no overlap between objects and between objects and the container boundaries. This paper combines the shifting strategy with heuristic algorithms to propose a heuristic algorithm aimed at solving large-scale equal circle packing problems. Experimental result prove that the heuristic algorithm based on the shift strategy can achieve Layouts as good as or better than those obtained without the shift strategy in most cases, especially showing higher computational efficiency in the majority of the tests.