Copyright © 2009 Mhand Hifi and Rym M'Hallah. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper reviews the most relevant literature on efficient models and methods for packing circular objects/items into Euclidean plane regions where the objects/items and regions are either two- or three-dimensional. These packing problems are NP hard optimization problems with a wide variety of applications. They have been tackled using various approaches-based algorithms ranging from computer-aided optimality proofs, to branch-and-bound procedures, to constructive approaches, to multi-start nonconvex minimization, to billiard simulation, to multiphase heuristics, and metaheuristics.