Hybrid constructive heuristics for the critical node problem

We consider the Critical Node Problem: given an undirected graph and an integer number K, at most K nodes have to be deleted from the graph in order to minimize a connectivity measure in the residual graph. We combine the basic steps used in common greedy algorithms with some flavour of local search, in order to obtain simple “hybrid” heuristic algorithm. The obtained algorithms are shown to be effective, delivering improved performances (solution quality and speed) with respect to known greedy algorithms and other more sophisticated state of the art methods.