A Greedy Heuristic Based on Corner Occupying Action for the 2D Circular Bin Packing Problem.

The paper proposes a new two-dimensional circular bin packing problem (2D-CBPP) that is closely related to the well-known 2D rectangular bin packing problem and the single container circle packing problem. Inspired by Gold corner, silver side and strawy void for Chinese Go game, a greedy algorithm based on corner occupying action (GACOA) is proposed for solving the 2D-CBPP. We define the corner occupying action to pack the outside circles into a bin as compactly as possible, such that the number of used bins is minimized. As there are no existing benchmarks for this proposed problem, we generate two sets of benchmark instances with equal and unequal circles respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs quite well on these 2D-CBPP instances.