A comparison of problem decomposition techniques for the FAP

This paper proposes a problem decomposition approach to solve hard Frequency Assignment Problem instances with standard meta-heuristics. The proposed technique aims to divide the initial problem into a number of easier subproblems, solve them and then recompose the partial solutions into one of the original problem. We consider the COST-259 MI-FAP instances and other Cardiff University test problems in order to simulate larger and more realistic networks. For both benchmarks the standard implementations of meta-heuristics do not generally produce a satisfactory performance within reasonable times of execution. However, the decomposed assignment approach can improve their results, both in terms of solution quality and runtime.

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