General forms of the quadratic assignment problem

摘要

In this paper, a general model has been formulated for facility location. The proposed model allows for locating several facilities in a single location, and as such, it is therefore a generalisation of the well-known quadratic assignment problem (QAP) and other variants. The general model has a wide range of applications in facility location, operations research and business. A branch-and-bound algorithm is developed for the generalised quadratic semi-assignment problem (GQSAP), which is a special form of the general model. The branch-and-bound algorithm is based on a modified version of the well-known Gilmore bound. Computational results are presented to corroborate the theoretical model developed here.