  This paper discusses the problem of placing weighted items in a circular
container in two-dimensional space. This problem is of great practical
significance in various mechanical engineering domains, such as the design of
communication satellites. Two constructive heuristics are proposed, one for
packing circular items and the other for packing rectangular items. These work
by first optimizing object placement order, and then optimizing object
positioning. Based on these heuristics, an ant colony optimization (ACO)
algorithm is described to search first for optimal positioning order, and then
for the optimal layout. We describe the results of numerical experiments, in
which we test two versions of our ACO algorithm alongside local search methods
previously described in the literature. Our results show that the constructive
heuristic-based ACO performs better than existing methods on larger problem
instances.
