Comparison of simulated annealing parallelization methods for quadratic assignment problems

Abstract

Quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is one of the most difficult combinatorial optimization problems in the NP-hard class. Due to the difficulty of the problem, many researchers have been studying this type of assignment problem. In this work simulated annealing method is parallelized on MATLAB platform and is used to solve 36 problems from QAPLIB which is a well-known QAP library. The performance of different parallelization methods is compared for the problems used. As a result, when compared with the serial simulated annealing method, it is seen that the parallel methods give faster results when the appropriate parameters are used.