A Modified Ant Algorithm for Solving the Quadratic Assignment Problem

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is one of the hardest combinatorial optimization problems known. Ant algorithms have been inspired by the behavior of real ant colonies. In this paper, we introduce random algorithm to the constructive procedure of the solution of ant system (AS) and adopt dynamic adaptive approach to update pheromone trails. In our algorithm, only partial facilities are randomly chosen to compute the designed probability. Experimental results for solving the QAP demonstrate that the proposed approach can obtain the better quality of the solutions.