Packing non‐identical circles within a rectangle with open length

Packing non‐identical circles inside a rectangle witnesses a wide range of industrial applications. However, the non‐convex constraints in this problem make it intractable using exact analytical approaches. Even via heuristic methods, the solution time for industrial‐scale instances sometimes is too long to be acceptable. This article aims to challenge the existing methods for the benchmark instances. The most significant contributions of this work are: firstly, we proposed three types of packing positions for selection and used human intelligence to convert an arbitrary circle sequence into a feasible compact layout; secondly, diverse position selection criteria have been tested, and it is found that the criterion commonly used in the literature is not the best; thirdly, the traditional genetic algorithm is adapted with lower crossover rate but higher mutation rate particularly, and a minor‐adjustment operator with the purpose of exploring the neighborhood of the current best solutions is introduced.