Results for de Carvalho et al. Problems

 The results reported here are based on the MRT algorithm described in Drezner (2008) based on the hybrid genetic algorithm of Drezner (2003).

 Recently de Carvalho and Rahmann (2006) introduced a new class of quadratic assignment problems that turn out to be extremely difficult to solve. There are 14 problems in this set. They were solved by GRASP (Olivera Pardalos and Resende, 2004 reported in de Carvalho and Rahmann, 2006), GATS (genetic algorithm and tabu search) solved by the method in Rodriguez et al., (2004), and EDA (estimation of distribution algorithms) reported in Pelikan et al. (2007). All these researchers report that these problems are extremely difficult to solve among the benchmark problems available on QAPLIB.

We experimented with many parameters for the MRT and found that for these problems the number of generations needs to be relatively large and the depth of the tabu search is less important (especially for the border length minimization problems). Each problem was run 10 times for each variant of parameter setting of MRT. Run times range from less than 2 minutes per single run for the n=36 problems to less than 9 hours for the n=144 problems. The results and the solutions for different parameters are reported here.

Instance

MRT

GRASP

GATS

EDA

Border Length Minimization

36

3,296

3,352

3,296

 

49

4,548

4,660

4,564

 

64

5,988

6,200

6,048

 

81

7,536

7,900

7,644

 

100

9,272

9,684

9,432

 

121

11,412

12,032

11,640

 

144

13,472

14,196

13,832

 

Conflict Index Minimization

36

168,611,971

169,925,219

169,016,907

168,705,477

49

236,355,034

238,859,844

237,077,377

236,355,034

64

325,671,035

327,770,071

326,696,412

326,251,579

81

427,447,820

434,317,170

428,682,120

427,852,554

100

523,146,366

532,573,788

525,401,670

 

121

653,416,978

664,137,090

658,317,466

 

144

795,009,899

813,127,758

803,379,686

 

Bibliography

de Carvalho Jr., S.A. and S. Rahmann (2006) “Microarray Layout as a Quadratic Assignment Problem," German Conference on Bioinformatics (GCB), LNI, To appear.

Drezner, Z. (2003) “A New Genetic Algorithm for the Quadratic Assignment Problem," INFORMS Journal on Computing, 15, 320-330.

Drezner, Z. (2008) “Extensive Experiments with Hybrid Genetic Algorithms for the Solution of the Quadratic Assignment Problem," Computers and Operations Research, 35, 717-736.

Oliveira, C.A.S., P.M. Pardalos and M.G.C. Resende (2004) “GRASP with Path-relinking for the Quadratic Assignment Problem," In Ribeiro, C.C. and Martins, S.L. (eds.), Efficient and Experimental Algorithms, LNCS, 3059, 356-368, Springer-Verlag.

Pelikan M., S. Tsutsui, and R. Kalapala (2007) “Dependency Trees, Permutations, and Quadratic Assignment Problem," Missouiri Estimation of Distribution Algorithms Laboratory (MEDAL) Report No. 2007003, January, 2007.

Rodriguez, J.M., F.C. MacPhee, D.J. Bonham, J.D. Horton, and V.C. Bhavsar (2004) “Best Permutations for the Dynamic Plant Layout Problem," In Dasgupta, A.R., Iyengar, S.S., and Bhatt, H.S. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advances in Computing and Communications (ADCOM 2004)}, Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi Ahmedabad, India, 173-178.