Solving quadratic assignment problem by symbiotic organisms search algorithm

Symbiotic organisms search algorithm (SOS) is a new meta-heuristic algorithm based on the symbiotic relationship between the biological, which was proposed in recent years. In this paper, we propose new robust and powerful metaheuristic algorithm called an improved version of symbiotic organisms search algorithm integrated with construction algorithm and mutation operators (ISOS) to solve quadratic assignment problems. The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) considers NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problem and has various practical applications. A set of benchmarks from QAPLIB Library are employed to evaluate the performance of proposed algorithm. ISOS is compared to several algorithms in the literature. The comparisons show that the proposed algorithm shows reliable, efficient and promising results.