A Survey on the Metaheuristics Applied to QAP for the Graphics Processing Units

The computational power requirements of real-world optimization problems begin to exceed the general performance of the Central Processing Unit (CPU). The modeling of such problems is in constant evolution and requires more computational power. Solving them is expensive in computation time and even metaheuristics, well known for their efficiency, begin to be unsuitable for the increasing amount of data. Recently, thanks to the advent of languages such as CUDA, the development of parallel metaheuristics on Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) platform to solve combinatorial problems such as the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) has received a growing interest. It is one of the most studied NP-hard problems and it is known for its high computational cost. In this paper, we survey several of the most important metaheuristics approaches for the QAP and we focus our survey on parallel metaheuristics using the GPU.