  For almost two decades the question of whether tabu search (TS) or simulated
annealing (SA) performs better for the quadratic assignment problem has been
unresolved. To answer this question satisfactorily, we compare performance at
various values of targeted solution quality, running each heuristic at its
optimal number of iterations for each target. We find that for a number of
varied problem instances, SA performs better for higher quality targets while
TS performs better for lower quality targets.
