Ant Colony Optimization for Solving the Quadratic Assignment Problem

Many real-world problems in logistics, transport, and manufacturing can be modeled as combinatorial optimization problems. In this work, a hybrid variant of meta-heuristic algorithm ant colony optimization (ACO) is used. Different variants of ant colony optimization have been applied to the quadratic assignment problem (QAP). In this paper a hybrid approach is proposed, which is combination of Ant system and other meta-heuristic approaches to take benefits of both methods. This hybrid approach is accompanied by a local search technique. Moreover, a comparative analysis is done using QAPLIB.