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A hybridized tabu search approach for the minimum weight vertex cover problem

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Abstract

The minimum weight vertex cover problem is a basic combinatorial optimization problem defined as follows. Given an undirected graph and positive weights for all vertices the objective is to determine a subset of the vertices which covers all edges such that the sum of the related cost values is minimized. In this paper we apply a modified reactive tabu search approach for solving the problem. While the initial concept of reactive tabu search involves a random walk we propose to replace this random walk by a controlled simulated annealing. Numerical results are presented outperforming previous metaheuristic approaches in most cases.

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Notes

  1. CPU times for the approaches reported in Table 1 can be found in the original references. Here we summarize times for the instances in the table and computing environments as they are reported in literature. ACO (Shyu et al. 2004) was run on a PC with AMD 1.7 GHz CPU and 256 MB RAM. CPU times vary between 4.3 and 6.6 seconds. HSSGA (Singh and Gupta 2006) was executed on a Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz system with 512 MB RAM. CPU times vary between 1.2 and 4.0 seconds. Computation times of the pilot method (Voß et al. 2005) were considerably larger using a Pentium IV with 1.8 GHz. They start at about 20 seconds per problem instance for an evaluation depth of 1 and scale linearly for the considered range of an evaluation depth value of 20. The modified ACO of Jovanovic and Tuba (2011) has been performed on an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 8500, 4 GHz with 4 GB RAM. Specific CPU times were not reported.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the MIC 2007. An extended abstract with results on the ring load balancing problem was presented at the LION 2012 conference (Voß and Fink 2012).

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Correspondence to Stefan Voß.

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Voß, S., Fink, A. A hybridized tabu search approach for the minimum weight vertex cover problem. J Heuristics 18, 869–876 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-012-9211-9

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