Contact searching is an important and time-consuming part of computer simulation of certain deformation processes. Contact searching can be facilitated by orthogonal range searching. We have experimentally evaluated four methods for orthogonal range searching: the projection method, the cell method, the k-d tree method, and the range tree method.
The results of our experiments indicate that two of these methods, the cell and k-d tree methods, have practical significance. The cell method is in most cases faster than the k-d tree method.