A heuristic approach for packing identical rectangles in convex regions

In this paper we propose a heuristic approach for the problem of packing equal rectangles within a convex region. The approach is based on an Iterated Local Search scheme, in which the key step is the perturbation move. Different perturbation moves, both combinatorial and continuous ones, are proposed and compared through extensive computational experiments on a set of test instances. The overall results are quite encouraging.