A New Node Centroid Algorithm for Bandwidth Minimization

Singapore Management University, 469 Buki t T imah Road Singapore 259756 [email protected] Fei X iao School of Comput ing National University of Singapore 3 Science Drive 2 Singapore 117543 [email protected] We propose a Node Centroid method with Hil lClimbing to solve the well-known matrix bandwidth minimization problem, which is to permute rows and columns of the matrix to minimize its bandwidth. Many heuristics have been developed for this NP-complete problem including the Cuthill-McKee (CM) and the Gibbs, Poole and Stockmeyer (GPS) algorithms. Recently, heuristics such as Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search and GRASP have been used, where Tabu Search and the GRASP with Path Relinking have achieved significantly better solution quality than the CM and GPS algorithms. Experimentation shows that the Node Centroid method achieves the best solution quality when compared with these while being much faster than the newly-developed algorithms.