This report, the data and also most of the best feasible solutions are available via World Wide Web. The URLs of the QAPLIB Home Page are http://www.opt.math.tu-graz.ac.at/qaplib/

We give algorithms to find the following simply described approximation to a given matrix. Given an m \Theta n matrix A with entries between say-1 and 1, and an error parameter ffl between 0 and 1, we find a matrix D (implicitly) which is the sum of O(1=ffl 2 ) simple rank 1 matrices so that the sum of entries of any submatrix (among the 2 m+n ) of (A \Gamma D) is at most fflmn in absolute value. Our algorithm takes time dependent only on ffl and the allowed probability of failure (not on m;n). We draw on two lines of research to develop the algorithms: one is built around the fundamental Regularity Lemma of Szemer'edi in Graph Theory and the constructive version of Alon, Duke, Leffman, Rodl and Yuster. The second one is from the papers of Arora, Karger and Karpinski, Fernandez de la Vega and most directly Goldwasser, Goldreich and Ron who develop approximation algorithms for a set of graph problems, typical of which is the maximum cut problem. ?From our matrix approximation, the...

Abstract. We discuss fast exponential time solutions for NP-complete problems. We survey known results and approaches, we provide pointers to the literature, and we discuss several open problems in this area. The list of discussed NP-complete problems includes the travelling salesman problem, scheduling under precedence constraints, satisfiability, knapsack, graph coloring, independent sets in graphs, bandwidth of a graph, and many more. 1

We present a randomized procedure for rounding fractional perfect matchings to (integral) matchings. If the original fractional matching satis es any linear inequality, then with high probability, the new matching satis es that linear inequality in an approximate sense. This extends the well-known LP rounding procedure of Raghavan and Thompson, which is usually used to round fractional solutions of linear programs.

Semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) are derived using the dual of the (homogenized) Lagrangian dual of appropriate equivalent representations of QAP. These relaxations result in the interesting, special, case where only the dual problem of the SDP relaxation has strict interior, i.e. the Slater constraint qualification always fails for the primal problem. Although there is no duality gap in theory, this indicates that the relaxation cannot be solved in a numerically stable way. By exploring the geometrical structure of the relaxation, we are able to find projected SDP relaxations. These new relaxations, and their duals, satisfy the Slater constraint qualification, and so can be solved numerically using primal-dual interior-point methods. For one of our models, a preconditioned conjugate gradient method is used for solving the large linear systems which arise when finding the Newton direction. The preconditioner is found by exploiting th...

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is among the hardest combinatorial optimization problems. Some instances of size n = 30 have remained unsolved for decades. The solution of these problems requires both improvements in mathematical programming algorithms and the utilization of powerful computational platforms. In this article we describe a novel approach to solve QAPs using a state-of-the-art branch-and-bound algorithm running on a federation of geographically distributed resources known as a computational grid. Solution of QAPs of unprecedented complexity, including the nug30, kra30b, and tho30 instances, is reported.

Guided Local Search (GLS) is an intelligent search scheme for combinatorial optimization problems. A main feature of the approach is the iterative use of local search. Information is gathered from various sources and exploited to guide local search to promising parts of the search space. The application of the method to the Travelling Salesman Problem and the Quadratic Assignment Problem is examined. Results reported show that the algorithm outperforms or compares very favorably with well-known and established optimization techniques such as simulated annealing and tabu search. Given the novelty of the approach and the very encouraging results, the method could have an important contribution to the development of intelligent search techniques for combinatorial optimization. 1. Introduction Guided Local Search is the outcome of a research project with main aim to extend the GENET neural network [29,26,5] for constraint satisfaction problems to partial constraint satisfaction [6,26] and...

Quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QQP) play an important modeling role for many diverse problems. These problems are in general NP hard, and numerically intractable. Lagrangian relaxations often provide good approximate solutions to these hard problems. Such relaxations are equivalent to semidefinite programming relaxations. For several special cases of QQP, e.g. convex programs and trust region subproblems, the Lagrangian relaxation provides the exact optimal value, i.e. there is a zero duality gap. However this is not true for the general QQP, or even the QQP with two convex constraints, but a nonconvex objective. In this paper we consider a certain QQP where the quadratic constraints correspond to the matrix orthogonality condition XX T = I. For this problem we show that the Lagrangian dual based on relaxing the constraints XX T = I, and the seemingly redundant constraints X T X = I, has a zero duality gap. This result has natural applications to quadratic assignm...

We describe a new convex quadratic programming bound for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP). The construction of the bound uses a semidefinite programming representation of a basic eigenvalue bound for QAP. The new bound dominates the well-known projected eigenvalue bound, and appears to be competitive with existing bounds in the tradeoff between bound quality and computational effort. Keywords: Quadratic Assignment Problem, Eigenvalue Bounds, Quadratic Programming, Semidefinite Programming. Dept. of Management Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 y Dept. of Computer Science, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 1 Introduction The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) in "Koopmans-Beckmann" form can be written QAP(A;B;C) : min tr(AXB + C)X T s:t: X 2 \Pi; where A, B and C are n \Theta n matrices, tr denotes the trace of a matrix, and \Pi is the set of n \Theta n permutation matrices. Throughout we assume that A and B are symmetric. The QAP is a very well-know...

We review various relaxations of (0,1)-quadratic programming problems. These include semidefinite programs, parametric trust region problems and concave quadratic maximization. All relaxations that we consider lead to efficiently solvable problems. The main contributions of the paper are the following. Using Lagrangian duality, we prove equivalence of the relaxations in a unified and simple way. Some of these equivalences have been known previously, but our approach leads to short and transparent proofs. Moreover we extend the approach to the case of equality constrained problems by taking the squared linear constraints into the objective function. We show how this technique can be applied to the Quadratic Assignment Problem, the Graph Partition Problem and the Max-Clique Problem. Finally we show our relaxation to be best possible among all quadratic majorants with zero trace.