GRASP with path-relinking for the generalized quadratic assignment problem

The generalized quadratic assignment problem (GQAP) is a generalization of the NP-hard quadratic assignment problem (QAP) that allows multiple facilities to be assigned to a single location as long as the capacity of the location allows. The GQAP has numerous applications, including facility design, scheduling, and network design. In this paper, we propose several GRASP with path-relinking heuristics for the GQAP using different construction, local search, and path-relinking procedures. We introduce a novel approximate local search scheme, as well as a new variant of path-relinking that deals with infeasibilities. Extensive experiments on a large set of test instances show that the best of the proposed variants is both effective and efficient.