A hybrid heuristic to solve a task allocation problem

In this paper, we propose a hybrid method to solve a special version of task allocation problems. This hybrid method combines Tabu search for finding local optimal solutions and noising method for diversifying the search scheme to solve this problem. An experiment is conducted to test the hybrid method against other methods. Experimental results indicate that the hybrid method is efficient so far as the run time is concerned. Besides, it produced much better solutions. Out of 30 problem instances, the hybrid method obtained 23 best solutions for total cost and 27 for fixed cost among the tested algorithms.