Solving the Identical Sphere Packing Problem with the Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Approach

Abstract : In this paper, we propose to solve packing identical spheres into a container with a particle swarm optimization-based approach. Given a set of identical spheres and a large container with unlimited length, the aim of the problem is to determine a minimum length of the container that contains all spheres without overlapping between spheres and between spheres and the edges of the container. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on a set of standard benchmark instances available in the literature and its obtained results are compared to the best published results. The experimental part shows that the proposed approach is very competitive, where new results are obtained.