# Where the Really Hard Quadratic Assignment Problems Are: the QAP-SAT instances

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02783 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02783/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The quadratic assignment problem is easy for Robinsonian matrices with Toeplitz structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.2801/) (2014)
- [Solving Challenging Large Scale QAPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09629/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is one of the major domains in the field of evolutionary computation, and more widely in combinatorial optimization. This paper studies the phase transition of the QAP, which can be described as a dramatic change in the problem's computational complexity and satisfiability, within a narrow range of the problem parameters. To approach this phenomenon, we introduce a new QAP-SAT design of the initial problem based on submodularity to capture its difficulty with new features. This decomposition is studied experimentally using branch-and-bound and tabu search solvers. A phase transition parameter is then proposed. The critical parameter of phase transition satisfaction and that of the solving effort are shown to be highly correlated for tabu search, thus allowing the prediction of difficult instances.