Barrakuda: A Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm for Minimum Capacitated Dominating Set Problem

Abstract

The minimum capacitated dominating set problem is an NP-hard variant of the well-known minimum dominating set problem in undirected graphs. This problem finds applications in the context of clustering and routing in wireless networks. Two algorithms are presented in this work. The first one is an extended version of construct, merge, solve and adapt, while the main contribution is a hybrid between a biased random key genetic algorithm and an exact approach which we labeled Barrakuda. Both algorithms are evaluated on a large set of benchmark instances from the literature. In addition, they are tested on a new, more challenging benchmark set of larger problem instances. In the context of the problem instances from the literature, the performance of our algorithms is very similar. Moreover, both algorithms clearly outperform the best approach from the literature. In contrast, Barrakuda is clearly the best-performing algorithm for the new, more challenging problem instances.