Experimental Analyses of the Life Span Method for the Quadratic Assignment Problem

In this paper, we report an application of the life span method (LSM), a variant of tabu search introduced by the authors, to the quadratic assignment problem which has applications on facility location and backboard wiring, etc. We discuss how to adapt the LSM to the quadratic assignment problem and compare the performance with previous heuristics. The main purpose of this paper is to perform experimental analyses composed of optimizing the various parameters and to estimate the performance not only in the best case but the average behavior.