Iterated local search for the quadratic assignment problem [An article from: European Journal of Operational Research]

This digital document is a journal article from European Journal of Operational Research, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Iterated local search (ILS) is a simple and powerful stochastic local search method. This article presents and analyzes the application of ILS to the quadratic assignment problem (QAP). We justify the potential usefulness of an ILS approach to this problem by an analysis of the QAP search space. However, an analysis of the run-time behavior of a basic ILS algorithm reveals a stagnation behavior which strongly compromises its performance. To avoid this stagnation behavior, we enhance the ILS algorithm using acceptance criteria that allow moves to worse local optima and we propose population-based ILS extensions. An experimental evaluation of the enhanced ILS algorithms shows their excellent performance when compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms for the QAP.