Anchored Rectangle and Square Packings

TL;DR

This paper studies anchored rectangle and square packings within the unit square, providing bounds on achievable packing areas, approximation algorithms, and complexity results for maximizing packed area.

Contribution

It establishes lower and upper bounds for anchored rectangle and square packings, and develops approximation algorithms and PTAS/QPTAS for maximizing packing area.

Findings

Anchored rectangle packing area at least 7/12 minus small error term.

Anchored square packing area at least 5/32, sometimes at most 7/27.

Greedy strategy achieves 9/47-approximation for square packings.

Abstract

For points $p_1,\ldots , p_n$ in the unit square $[0,1]^2$, an \emph{anchored rectangle packing} consists of interior-disjoint axis-aligned empty rectangles $r_1,\ldots , r_n\subseteq [0,1]^2$ such that point $p_i$ is a corner of the rectangle $r_i$ (that is, $r_i$ is \emph{anchored} at $p_i$) for $i=1,\ldots, n$. We show that for every set of $n$ points in $[0,1]^2$, there is an anchored rectangle packing of area at least $7/12-O(1/n)$, and for every $n\in \mathbf{N}$, there are point sets for which the area of every anchored rectangle packing is at most $2/3$. The maximum area of an anchored \emph{square} packing is always at least $5/32$ and sometimes at most $7/27$. The above constructive lower bounds immediately yield constant-factor approximations, of $7/12 -\varepsilon$ for rectangles and $5/32$ for squares, for computing anchored packings of maximum area in $O(n\log n)$ time. We prove that a simple greedy strategy achieves a $9/47$-approximation for anchored square packings, and $1/3$ for lower-left anchored square packings. Reductions to maximum weight independent set (MWIS) yield a QPTAS and a PTAS for anchored rectangle and square packings in $n^{O(1/\varepsilon)}$ and $\exp({\rm poly}(\log (n/\varepsilon)))$ time, respectively.