New Simulated Annealing Algorithm for Quadratic Assignment Problem

Abstract — In facility layout design, the problem of locating facilities with material flow between them was formulated as a Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), so that the total cost to move the required material between the facilities is minimized, where the cost is defined by a quadratic function. In this paper, a new definition in cooling scheduling is proposed for simulated annealing algorithm to solve the QAPs. Also a simple greedy-type algorithm is proposed to improve this method. The algorithm is implemented and tested on 40 benchmarks. In comparison with many other recently developed methods, considerable results are obtained by this approach. Keywords- QAP; Simulated annealing; Cooling Schedule; Greedy search