A quasi-physical algorithm based on coarse and fine adjustment for solving circles packing problem with constraints of equilibrium

The circles packing problem with constraints of equilibrium, as a two-dimensional packing problem with the background of satellite module layout design, is an NP hard layout optimization problem. A mathematical model and two new physical models are established for this problem. And inspired by the process of coarse and fine adjustment in the industry, a Quasi-Physical algorithm based on Coarse and Fine Adjustment (QPCFA) is proposed. Not only can QPCFA keep the diversity of the searching space to facilitate the global search, but also it can do fine search in promising local areas to find the corresponding local optimal solutions. Moreover, the taboo method and the jump pit strategy are combined to improve the performance of this algorithm. Experiments on 11 representative instances show that QPCFA achieve new and better results on seven ones and matched the current best records on the other four. In addition, the calculation accuracy is improved considerably.