A new heuristic algorithm for the circular packing problem with equilibrium constraints

The circular packing problem with equilibrium constraints is an optimization problem about simplified satellite module layout design.A heuristic algorithm based on tabu search is put forward for solving this problem.The algorithm begins from a random initial configuration and applies the gradient method with an adaptive step length to search for the minimum energy configuration.To jump out of the local minima and avoid the search doing repeated work,the algorithm adopts the strategy of tabu search.In the process of tabu search,we improve the traditional neighboring solutions,tabu objects and the acceptance criteria of the current solution effectively.We test two sets of benchmarks consisting of 11 representative instances from the current literature.The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm breaks the records in seven out of 11 instances,and obtains the optimal solutions for the other four instances.