What is VPSC?

aspiers asked: "What is VPSC?", see vpsc.ts. It stands for "Variable Placement with Separation Constraints". The VPSC problem is, for a set of positions (e.g. positions in an x- or y-axis), what are the closest positions to those given which satisfy a particular set of simple linear separation constraints? We treat this as a quadratic program and solve it with a special solver we have developed that works very efficiently. More details about the VPSC problem and the solver in this paper.