Close-packing of orthogonal forms

This is a city planning problem.

I'm trying to order some rectangular buildings of given size within a lot, so that the building corners are always within a max distance D to the other buildings and that there is as little 开发者_运维知识库"wasted" space as possible.

Is there a close-packing algorithm I can use for this purpose? Is the Voronai-algorithm in some form applicable?

Thank you for your consideration.

This requirement

building corners are always within a max distance D to the other buildings

can be modfied by increasing the outer bounds of each rectangle by an edge of width D/2. This leaves you with a standard 2D Strip packing problem. Here

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/36005

you find a nice article how to attack those kind of problems, sample programs (C#, VB.NET) included. Here is a Wikipedia article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem

which may help you a little bit, too.