Iterated tabu search for the circular open dimension problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces an iterated tabu search method for the circular open dimension problem, effectively minimizing strip length for circle packing by improving existing solutions through a combination of local search, perturbation, and acceptance strategies.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel iterated tabu search algorithm that outperforms previous methods on benchmark instances of the CODP and related circle packing problems.

Findings

ITS improves 13 out of 18 best known results on CODP instances.

The method effectively handles packing circles into a strip and a circular container.

Perturbation and acceptance strategies significantly influence solution quality.

Abstract

This paper mainly investigates the circular open dimension problem (CODP), which consists of packing a set of circles of known radii into a strip of fixed width and unlimited length without overlapping. The objective is to minimize the length of the strip. An iterated tabu search approach, named ITS, is proposed. ITS starts from a randomly generated solution and attempts to gain improvements by a tabu search procedure. After that, if the obtained solution is not feasible, a perturbation operator is subsequently employed to reconstruct the incumbent solution and an acceptance criterion is implemented to determine whether or not accept the perturbed solution. This process is repeated until a feasible solution has been found or the allowed computation time has been elapsed. Computational experiments based on well-known benchmark instances show that ITS produces quite competitive results with respect to the best known results. For 18 representative CODP instances taken from the literature, ITS succeeds in improving 13 best known results within reasonable time. In addition, for another challenging related variant: the problem of packing arbitrary sized circles into a circular container, ITS also succeeds in improving many best known results. Supplementary experiments are also provided to analyze the influence of the perturbation operator, as well as the acceptance criterion.