Approximate Muscle Guided Beam Search for Three-Index Assignment Problem

As a well-known NP-hard problem, the Three-Index Assignment Problem (AP3) has attracted lots of research efforts for developing heuristics. However, existing heuristics either obtain less competitive solutions or consume too much running time. In this paper, a new heuristic named Approximate Muscle guided Beam Search (AMBS) is developed to achieve a good trade-off between solution quality and running time. By combining the approximate muscle with beam search, the solution space size can be significantly decreased, thus the time for searching the solution can be sharply reduced. Extensive experimental results on the benchmark indicate that the new algorithm is able to obtain solutions with competitive quality and it can be employed on instances with large-scale. Work of this paper not only proposes a new efficient heuristic, but also provides a promising method to improve the efficiency of beam search.