An Efficient Evolutionary Algorithm for Strict Strong Graph Coloring Problem

A very promising approach for combinatorial optimization is evolutionary algorithms. As an application, this paper deals with the strict strong graph coloring problem defined by Haddad and Kheddouci (2009) where the authors have proposed an exact polynomial time algorithm for trees. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new evolutionary algorithm for solving this problem for general graphs. It combines an original crossover and a powerful correction operator. Experiments of this new approach are carried out on large Dimacs Challenge benchmark graphs. Results show very competitive with and even better than those of state of the art algorithms. To the best of the author’s knowledge, it is the first time that an evolutionary algorithm is proposed to solve the strict strong graph coloring problem.