On the Design of a Partition Crossover for the Quadratic Assignment Problem

Abstract

We conduct a study on the design of a partition crossover for the QAP. On the basis of a bipartite graph representation, we propose to recombine the unshared components from parents, while enabling their fast evaluation using a preprocessing step for objective function decomposition. Besides a formal description and complexity analysis of the proposed crossover, we conduct an empirical analysis on its relative behavior using a number of large-size QAP instances, and a number of baseline crossovers. The proposed operator is shown to have a relatively high intensification ability, while keeping execution time relatively low.