Incorporating a modified uniform crossover and 2-exchange neighborhood mechanism in a discrete bat algorithm to solve the quadratic assignment problem

The bat algorithm is one of the recent nature-inspired algorithms, which has been emerged as a powerful search method for solving continuous as well as discrete problems. The quadratic assignment problem is a well-known NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization. The goal of this problem is to assign n facilities to n locations in such a way as to minimize the assignment cost. For that purpose, this paper introduces a novel discrete variant of bat algorithm to deal with this combinatorial optimization problem. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a set of benchmark instances from the QAPLIB library and the performance was compared to other algorithms. The empirical results of exhaustive experiments were promising and illustrated the efficacy of the suggested approach.