Heuristic approach for bandwidth consecutive multi-coloring problem

Abstract

Bandwidth consecutive multicoloring problem is also known as a b-coloring problem. Let G = (V, E) be a graph where V is the set of vertices and E is the set of edges. Let each vertex v of V has a positive integer weight b (v) and each edge (v, w) of E has a non-negative integer weight b (v, w). A bandwidth consecutive multicoloring of a graph is a problem of assigning b (v) consecutive positive integers to each vertex v of V in such a manner that the difference between all the integers of vertex v and all the integers of vertex w is greater than b (v, w). The maximum integer assigned in this coloring is called the span of the coloring. The b-coloring is the problem of minimizing this span. No metaheuristic is proposed for general graphs so far for this problem till date as it is strongly NP-hard. In this paper, we proposed three heuristics for the problem including a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP). The efficiency of these algorithms is tested on benchmark graphs and their performance is compared among themselves. Experimental results showed that among all three proposed heuristics, GRASP performed well for the given problem.