Since August 2002 QAPLIB is maintained by Peter Hahn at the University of Pennsylvania.
Click here for an up-to-date version of QAPLIB .
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 last 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
We thank all colleagues who contributed to QAPLIB over the last years.
The QAPLIB home page was created by Stefan Karisch who maintained it until
1997. We are very grateful to Stefan for his work with QAPLIB.
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 letting us now their data and
their solutions.
Contact Address
Eranda Çela, Institute of Mathematics, Graz University of Technology, Steyrergasse
30, 8010 Graz, Austria; Email
cela@opt.math.tu-graz.ac.at