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

. It is well known that, in general, exact algorithms for the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) cannot solve problems of size N > lfi. Therefore, it is necessary to use heuristic approaches for solving large-scale QAPs. In this paper, we consider I. class of heuristic a.pproaches based on local' search criteria.. In particular, we selected four algorithms; CRAFT, Simulated Annealing, TABU search and the Gra.ph Partitioning (GP) a.pproa.c:h and studied their rela.tive performance in terms· of the quality of solutions and CPU times. All of these algoritltms performed roughly the same, based on the results of two seis of test problems Ixecated on a.n IBM ES/3090-600S computer.