A Systolic Algorithm for the Quadratic Assignment Problem and its FPGA Implementation

In this paper, we propose a parallel algorithm to solve the quadratic assignment problem in a short execution time. The proposed algorithm is based on tabu search, and its main body is a systolic algorithm, which runs on a one-dimensional array of simple processing units. During the algorithm execution, multiple neighborhood solutions are evaluated in parallel and each solution is evaluated in a pipeline fashion. The proposed algorithm effectively utilizes internal block RAMs of recent large scale FPGAs. Experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.