A computational comparison of local search heuristics for solving quadratic assignment problems

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Pardalos, Panos M. | Murthy, Kowta A. | Harrison, Terry P.

Affiliations: University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 | The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802

Abstract: It is well known that, in general, exact algorithms for the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) cannot solve problems of size N>15. Therefore, it is necessary to use heuristic approaches for solving large-scale QAPs. In this paper, we consider a class of heuristic approaches based on local search criteria. In particular, we selected four algorithms; CRAFT, Simulated Annealing, TABU search and the Graph Partitioning (GP) approach and studied their relative performance in terms of the quality of solutions and CPU times. All of these algorithms performed roughly the same, based on the results of two sets of test problems executed on an IBM ES/3090-600S computer.

Keywords: quadratic assignment, local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, graph positioning, testing

DOI: 10.3233/INF-1993-41-212

Journal: Informatica, vol. 4, no. 1-2, pp. 172-187, 1993