Globally optimized packings of non-uniform size spheres in $$\mathbb {R}^{d}$$: a computational study

In this work we discuss the following general packing problem: given a finite collection of d-dimensional spheres with (in principle) arbitrarily chosen radii, find the smallest sphere in \(\mathbb {R}^{d}\) that contains the given d-spheres in a non-overlapping arrangement. Analytical (closed-form) solutions cannot be expected for this very general problem-type: therefore we propose a suitable combination of constrained nonlinear optimization methodology with specifically designed heuristic search strategies, in order to find high-quality numerical solutions in an efficient manner. We present optimized sphere configurations with up to \(n = 50\) spheres in dimensions \(d = 2, 3, 4, 5\). Our numerical results are on average within 1% of the entire set of best known results for a well-studied model-instance in \(\mathbb {R}^{2}\), with new (conjectured) packings for previously unexplored generalizations of the same model-class in \(\mathbb {R}^{d}\) with \(d= 3, 4, 5.\) Our results also enable the estimation of the optimized container sphere radii and of the packing fraction as functions of the model instance parameters n and 1 / n, respectively. These findings provide a general framework to define challenging packing problem-classes with conjectured numerical solution estimates.