Title: A hybrid algorithm of simulated annealing and tabu search for graph colouring problem

Authors: Ali Pahlavani, Kourosh Eshghi

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Narmak, Tehran 16844, Iran. ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Azadi Avenue, Tehran 11365-9414, Iran

Abstract: The graph colouring problem, as an important NP-complete problem, is considered in this paper and a hybrid meta-heuristic approach is developed to solve it. The initial solution of the algorithm, generated by a heuristic method, is used by a simulated annealing (SA) approach to generate new solutions until no progress in a number of solutions reported. At this stage, the algorithm will use a tabu search routine and this local search operator will be followed for some iterations. After finding a better solution, the algorithm is again followed through SA. Efficiency of the algorithm is showed through various experiments on well-known benchmark problems of DIMACS. Comparison with the available algorithms shows considerable performance in terms of solution quality and computational time.

Keywords: graph colouring; hybrid metaheuristics; tabu search; simulated annealing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2011.040694

International Journal of Operational Research, 2011 Vol.11 No.2, pp.136 - 159

Published online: 14 Feb 2015 *

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