Parallel Chemical Reaction Optimization for the Quadratic Assignment Problem

Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), a recently proposed metaheuristic, has demonstrated its capability in solving NP-hard optimization problems. CRO is a population-based evolutionary technique inspired by the interactions between molecules in a chemical reaction. In this paper, we present a parallel version of CRO (named PCRO) with a synchronous communication strategy. PCRO is applied to solve the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), which is considered one of the great challenges in combinatorial optimization. Simulation results show that compared with the sequential CRO, our proposed PCRO can not only reduce the computation time but also improve the quality of the solution for instances of QAP with large sizes.