A survey of local search methods for graph coloring

  • Authors:
  • Philippe Galinier;Alain Hertz

  • Affiliations:
  • CRT-Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal, Que., Canada;GERAD-Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal, Que., Canada

  • Venue:
  • Computers and Operations Research - Anniversary focused issue of computers & operations research on tabu search
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Tabucol is a tabu search algorithm that tries to determine whether the vertices of a given graph can be colored with a fixed number k of colors such that no edge has both endpoints with the same color. This algorithm was proposed in 1987, one year after Fred Glover's article that launched tabu search. While more performing local search algorithms have now been proposed, Tabucol remains very popular and is often chosen as a subroutine in hybrid algorithms that combine a local search with a population based method. In order to explain this unfailing success, we make a thorough survey of local search techniques for graph coloring problems, and we point out the main differences between all these techniques.