Office-Space-Allocation Problem Using Harmony Search Algorithm

Office-Space-Allocation problem is a distribution of a set of limited spaces to a set of resources subject to two types of constraints: hard and soft. Hard constraints must be fulfilled while the soft constraints to be satisfied as much as possible. The quality of the solution is determined based on satisfaction of the soft constraints and the best usage of spaces. The harmony search algorithm (HSA) is a population-based metaheuristic inspired by a musical improvisation process. At each iteration, three operators are used to generate the new harmony: memory consideration, random consideration, and pitch adjustment. In this paper, we modify the memory consideration operator to select from the best solution in the population during the search. HSA is evaluated by using three datasets from Nottingham, and Wolverhampton universities. Experimentally, the HSA obtained new results for two datasets, and a comparable result for the third dataset.