An Improved Tabu Search Algorithm for the Quadratic Assignment Problem

An improved tabu search algorithm(ITS)for the quadratic assignment problem(QAP)is proposed.ITS is based on "intensification and diversification" methodology.An efficient local search and subsequent reconstruction of elite solutions is applied in an iterated way.The local search procedure uses robust tabu search(RTS).In the reconstruction procedure,MPX crossover operator is applied to the good locally optimal solutions to produce new feasible solution.Comparisons of ITS and RTS are performed on the publicly available QAP instances from QAPLIB.The result demonstrates that ITS significantly outperforms RTS for QAP problem.