Since August 2002, the QAPLIB page has been maintained at the
University of Pennsylvania, School of Engineering and Applied Science, by
Peter Hahn,
Email hahn@seas.upenn.edu
Since December 2008, the QAPLIB has a
mirror site
at the University of Waterloo,
Department of Management Sciences, by Miguel Anjos,
Email manjos@uwaterloo.ca
Contents
Introduction
The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) has remained one of the great
challenges in combinatorial optimization. It is still considered a computationally
nontrivial task to solve modest size problems, say of size n=25.
The QAPLIB was first published in 1991, in order to provide a unified testbed
for QAP, accessible to the scientific community. It consisted of virtually
all QAP instances that were accessible to the authors at that time. Due
to the continuing demand for these instances, and the strong feedback from
many researchers, a major update was provided by Burkard, Karisch and Rendl
in 1994. This update was also accessible through anonymous ftp. This update
included many new problem instances, generated by several researchers for
their own testing purposes. Moreover, a list of current champions, i.e. best
known feasible solutions, and best lower bounds was included.
The update of April 1996 reflected on one hand the big changes in electronic
communication. QAPLIB became a World Wide Web site, the QAPLIB Home Page.
On the other hand, the update was necessary, due to the increased research
activities around the QAP. A short list of at-that-time-recent dissertations
concerning QAP, was included.
The update of June 2000 reflects the progress made on the QAP especially
on solving new test instances and test instances which were previously
not solved to optimality. It includes an updated list of people working on
the QAP and an updated list of surveys and dissertations on the QAP.
The update of January 2002 reflects the progress made more recently
on the QAP. The emphasis relies on the optimal solution of test instances
which were previously not solved to optimality. The optimal solutions
were obtained by using new bounding techniques and new branch and bound
schemes generally implemented in very powerful parallel computation environments.
This update also includes new test instances and some improvements on
the best known solutions of existing test instances. The list of people
working on the QAP as well the list of references have also been updated.
The web site will be updated on a regular basis and we hope that, with
your help, the QAPLIB Home Page will be an up-to-date source for the QAP.
We appreciate any hints on new and better solutions to existing instances
or new test instances form QAPLIB, as well as any hints on recent literature
pointers on the QAP.
Acknowledgments
The QAPLIB home page was created by Stefan Karisch who maintained it until
1997. From 1997 to July 2002 QAPLIB was maintained by Eranda Çela.
We thank all colleagues who contributed to QAPLIB over the years. For
the April 1996 update we are particularly grateful to Charles Fleurent, Michael
Perregaard, Mauricio Resende and Eric Taillard for making their data and
solutions available to us. For the updates of June 2000 and January 2002
we would like to particularly thank Kurt Anstreicher, Nathan Brixius, Jean-Pierre
Goux, Peter Hahn and Jeffrey Linderoth for providing us with their data
and their solutions.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant
No. CMMI 0400155.
Contact Information
Please send new results, references, and other updates to one of us:
Peter Hahn, Electrical and Systems Engineering Dept., University of Pennsylvania,
200 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA;
Email
hahn@seas.upenn.edu
Miguel Anjos, Department of Management Sciences, University of Waterloo,
200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada;
Email manjos@uwaterloo.ca