Combining Cuckoo and Tabu Algorithms for Solving Quadratic Assignment Problems

Abstract

Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is one the combinatorial optimization problems. Research on this type of problems has been done in many companies for allocating some facilities to some locations. The issue of particular importance in this process is the costs of this allocation. Therefore, the attempt in this problem is to minimize this group of costs. Since the QAP’s are from NP-hard problem, they cannot be solved by exact solution methods. Meta-heuristic methods give acceptable solutions in sensible times to NP-hard problems in engineering and science fields. In this work, QAP was first solved by themeta-heuristic Cuckoo algorithm, and then this algorithm was combined with the Tabu algorithm and the results were compared. It is shown that the combination of Cuckoo and Tabu algorithms leads to more optimized solutions. The results were also compared with other meta-heuristic algorithms and the results show that the combination of Cuckoo and Tabu algorithms is better than other single algorithms.