Greedy algorithms for packing unequal circles into a rectangular container

In this paper, we study the problem of packing unequal circles into a two-dimensional rectangular container. We solve this problem by proposing two greedy algorithms. The first algorithm, denoted by B1.0, selects the next circle to place according to the maximum-hole degree rule, that is inspired from human activity in packing. The second algorithm, denoted by B1.5, improves B1.0 with a self-look-ahead search strategy. The comparisons with the published methods on several instances taken from the literature show the good performance of our approach.