Breakout local search for the quadratic assignment problem

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is one of the most studied combinatorial optimization problems with various practical applications. In this paper, we present breakout local search (BLS) for solving QAP. BLS explores the search space by a joint use of local search and adaptive perturbation strategies. Experimental evaluations on the set of QAPLIB benchmark instances show that the proposed approach is able to attain current best-known results for all but two instances with an average computing time of less than 4.5 hours. Comparisons are also provided to show the competitiveness of the proposed approach with respect to the best-performing QAP algorithms from the literature. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.