An improved energy landscape paving algorithm for the problem of packing circles into a larger containing circle

The problem of packing circles into a larger containing circle is a kind of NP-hard problem. It is of high theoretical and practical value. Lacking powerful optimization method is the key obstacle to solving this problem. The energy landscape paving (ELP) method is a class of heuristic global optimization algorithm and a generation of Monte Carlo method. By incorporating new configuration update mechanism into ELP method, an improved energy landscape paving (ELP+) algorithm is put forward. The computational results, on two sets of instances taken from the literature, show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.