Disk packing for the estimation of the size of a wire bundle (Q1764345)

A heuristic method for packing disks in a circle is constructed, and is applied to the estimation of the sizes of holes through which given sets of electric wires are to pass. In the proposed method, a sufficiently large circle is initially constructed, and it is shrunk step by step while keeping all the disks inside. For this purpose a Voronoi diagram for circles is used. Computational experiments show the validity and the efficiency of the method.