Solving the problem of packing equal and unequal circles in a circular container

In this paper we propose a Monotonic Basin Hopping approach and its population-based variant Population Basin Hopping to solve the problem of packing equal and unequal circles within a circular container with minimum radius. Extensive computational experiments have been performed both to analyze the problem at hand, and to choose in an appropriate way the parameter values for the proposed methods. Different improvements with respect to the best results reported in the literature have been detected.