Partitioning is an important problem in the design automation of integrated circuits. This problem in many of its
formulation is NP-Hard, and several heuristic methods have been proposed for its solution. To evaluate the
effectiveness of the various partitioning heuristics, it is desirable to have test cases with known optimal solutions
that are as “random looking” as possible. In this paper, we describe several methods for the construction of such
test cases. All our methods except one use the theory of network flow. The remaining method uses a relationship
between a partitioning problem and the geometric clustering problem. The latter problem can be solved in
polynomial time in any fixed dimension.