Intelligent local search strategies for solving facility layout problems with the quadratic assignment problem formulation

In this paper, we implement a tabu search heuristic, a probabilistic tabu search heuristic, a simulated annealing heuristic, and a hybrid tabu search heuristic to solve facility layout problems with the Quadratic Assignment Problem formulation. Classical problems are used as a benchmark for performance comparison. Extensive computational experiments were conducted, and the results were statistically analyzed to observe the behavior of each heuristic and to discriminate the performance of each heuristic. The computational results strongly support the competitiveness of intelligent heuristics for the design of facilities. The hybrid tabu search heuristic, combining the advantages from both tabu search and simulated annealing, can generally outperform their parent algorithms.