Algodesk: An experimental comparison of eight evolutionary heuristics applied to the Quadratic Assignment Problem

This work compares the effectiveness of eight evolutionary heuristic algorithms applied to the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), reputedly one of the most difficult combinatorial optimization problems. QAP is merely used as a carrier for the comparison: we do not attempt to compare any heuristics with solving algorithms specific for it. Results are given, both with respect to the best result achieved by each algorithm in a limited time span and to its speed of convergence to that result.