Approximate solutions to the turbine balancing problem

The turbine balancing problem (TBP) is an NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problem arising in the manufacturing and maintenance of turbine engines. Exact solution methods for solving the TBP are not appropriate since the problem has to be solved in real time and the input data is itself inaccurate. In this paper the TBP is formulated as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP) and we propose a heuristic algorithm for solving the resulting problem. Computational results on a set of instances provided by Pratt & Whitney (P&W) and from the literature, indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the current methods used for solving the TBP, and has the best overall performance with respect to other heuristic algorithms in the literature.