Informatica

In this paper, an efficient hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) and its variants for the well-known combinatorial optimization problem, the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) are discussed. In particular, we tested our algorithms on a special type of QAPs, the structured quadratic assignment problems. The results from the computational experiments on this class of problems demonstrate that HGAs allow to achieve near-optimal and (pseudo-)optimal solutions at very reasonable computation times. The obtained results also confirm that the hybrid genetic algorithms are among the most suitable heuristic approaches for this type of QAPs.

Given a set of objects with profits (any, even negative, numbers) assigned not only to separate objects but also to pairs of them, the unconstrained binary quadratic optimization problem consists in finding a subset of objects for which the overall profit is maximized. In this paper, an iterated tabu search algorithm for solving this problem is proposed. Computational results for problem instances of size up to 7000 variables (objects) are reported and comparisons with other up-to-date heuristic methods are provided.

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is one of the well‐known combinatorial optimization problems and is known for its various applications. In this paper, we propose a modified simulated annealing algorithm for the QAP – M‐SA‐QAP. The novelty of the proposed algorithm is an advanced formula of calculation of the initial and final temperatures, as well as an original cooling schedule with oscillation, i.e., periodical decreasing and increasing of the temperature. In addition, in order to improve the results obtained, the simulated annealing algorithm is combined with a tabu search approach based algorithm. We tested our algorithm on a number of instances from the library of the QAP instances – QAPLIB. The results obtained from the experiments show that the proposed algorithm appears to be superior to earlier versions of the simulated annealing for the QAP. The power of M‐SA‐QAP is also corroborated by the fact that the new best known solution was found for the one of the largest QAP instances – THO150.

In this paper we present an algorithm for generating quadratic assignment problem (QAP) instances with known provably optimal solution. The flow matrix of such instances is constructed from the matrices corresponding to special graphs whose size may reach the dimension of the problem. In this respect, the algorithm generalizes some existing algorithms based on the iterative selection of triangles only. The set of instances which can be produced by the algorithm is NP-hard. Using multi-start descent heuristic for the QAP, we compare experimentally such test cases against those created by several existing generators and against Nugent-type problems from the QAPLIB as well.

In this paper we define a class of edge-weighted graphs having nonnegatively valued bisections. We show experimentally that complete such graphs with more than three vertices and also some special graphs with only positive edges can be applied to improve the existing lower bounds for a version of the quadratic assignment problem, namely with a matrix composed of rectilinear distances between points in the Euclidean space.