A parallel hybrid genetic algorithm-simulated annealing for solving Q3AP on computational grid

In this paper we propose a parallel hybrid genetic method for solving Quadratic 3-dimensional Assignment Problem (Q3AP). This problem is proved to be computationally NP-hard. The parallelism in our algorithm is of two hierarchical levels. The first level is an insular model where a number of GAs (genetic algorithms) evolve in parallel. The second level is a parallel transformation of individuals in each GA. Implementation has been done using ParadisEO1 framework, and the experiments have been performed on GRID5000, the French nation-wide computational grid. To evaluate our method, we used three benchmarks derived from QAP instances of QAPLIB and the results are compared with those reported in the literature. The preliminary results show that the method is promising. The obtained solutions are close to the optimal values and the execution is efficient.