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Multi-start iterated tabu search for the minimum weight vertex cover problem

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Abstract

The minimum weight vertex cover problem (MWVCP) is one of the most popular combinatorial optimization problems with various real-world applications. Given an undirected graph where each vertex is weighted, the MWVCP is to find a subset of the vertices which cover all edges of the graph and has a minimum total weight of these vertices. In this paper, we propose a multi-start iterated tabu search algorithm (MS-ITS) to tackle MWVCP. By incorporating an effective tabu search method, MS-ITS exhibits several distinguishing features, including a novel neighborhood construction procedure and a fast evaluation strategy. Extensive experiments on the set of public benchmark instances show that the proposed heuristic is very competitive with the state-of-the-art algorithms in the literature.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to memorizing the authors’ mentor Prof. Wenqi Huang for his lifelong instruction. We thank the anonymous referee for the helpful comments to improve our paper significantly. Special thanks are given to Tao Qin and Hongyun Xu for partially implementing the code and refining the paper. The research was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61370183, 61100144), and the program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET 2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Smart, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, People’s Republic of China

    Taoqing Zhou, Zhipeng Lü, Yang Wang, Junwen Ding & Bo Peng

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  1. Taoqing Zhou
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  2. Zhipeng Lü
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  3. Yang Wang
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  4. Junwen Ding
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  5. Bo Peng
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Correspondence to Bo Peng.

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Zhou, T., Lü, Z., Wang, Y. et al. Multi-start iterated tabu search for the minimum weight vertex cover problem. J Comb Optim 32, 368–384 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-015-9909-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-015-9909-3

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