Reformulation descent applied to circle packing problems [An article from: Computers and Operations Research]
Book Details
PublisherElsevier
ISBN / ASINB000RR7RFC
ISBN-13978B000RR7RF1
AvailabilityAvailable for download now
Sales Rank12,855,879
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
This digital document is a journal article from Computers and Operations Research, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
Several years ago classical Euclidean geometry problems of densest packing of circles in the plane have been formulated as nonconvex optimization problems, allowing to find heuristic solutions by using any available NLP solver. In this paper we try to improve this procedure. The faster NLP solvers use first order information only, so stop in a stationary point. A simple switch from Cartesian coordinates to polar or vice versa, may destroy this stationarity and allow the solver to descend further. Such formulation switches may of course be iterated. For densest packing of equal circles into a unit circle, this simple feature turns out to yield results close to the best known, while beating second order methods by a time-factor well over 100. This technique is formalized as a general reformulation descent (RD) heuristic, which iterates among several formulations of the same problem until local searches obtain no further improvement. We also briefly discuss how RD might be used within other metaheuristic schemes.
Description:
Several years ago classical Euclidean geometry problems of densest packing of circles in the plane have been formulated as nonconvex optimization problems, allowing to find heuristic solutions by using any available NLP solver. In this paper we try to improve this procedure. The faster NLP solvers use first order information only, so stop in a stationary point. A simple switch from Cartesian coordinates to polar or vice versa, may destroy this stationarity and allow the solver to descend further. Such formulation switches may of course be iterated. For densest packing of equal circles into a unit circle, this simple feature turns out to yield results close to the best known, while beating second order methods by a time-factor well over 100. This technique is formalized as a general reformulation descent (RD) heuristic, which iterates among several formulations of the same problem until local searches obtain no further improvement. We also briefly discuss how RD might be used within other metaheuristic schemes.
