Vortrag aus Archiv

Ellipsoid packing with applications to chromosome organization

07.05.2012

We consider the problem of packing ellipsoids of different size and shape in an ellipsoidal container so as to minimize a measure of total overlap. The motivating application is chromosome organization in the human cell nucleus.  We describe a bilevel optimization formulation, together with an algorithm for the general case and a simpler algorithm for the special case in which all ellipsoids are in fact spheres. We prove convergence to stationary points of this non-convex problem, and describe computational experience, including results from the chromosome packing application.