A Review of the Placement and Quadratic Assignment Problems

The physical design of a computer requires the placement of logic packages which must be interconnected to form a backplane. In this paper' the placement problem is explored and a survey of algorithms is presented for the attack of it and the associated quadratic assignment problem. Also presented are known experimental results of the algorithms defined, conclusions and areas for future research. Although the problem of placement of modules has been emphasized, the techniques are useful for handling the general problem of finding optimal locations for a set of objects that must be interconnected.