Swarm-Based Spreading Points

In this paper we propose a Swarm-based Spreading Points algorithm (SSP) for improving the solutions for packing problems. The SSP repositions the initial set of points and evolves it to improve the minimum distance between points. During the evolving process, for each point, a feasible direction of movement is computed according to its nearest neighbors so that the shortest pairwise distance between the point and other points can be increased along this direction (if any). Our experiments showed that the SSP algorithm can improve certain best-known solutions for some problems previously reported in the literature.