Vertex coloring based on artificial bee colony algorithm

Given an undirected graph with a set of vertices and edges, vertex coloring, a well-known classical optimization problem in graph theory, consists of partitioning all vertices into independent sets and assigning unique colors to adjacent vertices with an effort to use the least number of colors. This paper presents a new algorithm based on artificial bee colony for solving the aforementioned problem. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the DIMACS challenging benchmarks and computational results show that the presented method achieves highly competitive results. The outstanding outcomes of our algorithm are related to its computational time and also the number of colors it uses. Our simulations show that the computational time is considerably short and also the number of colors for vertex coloring is optimal in most of the cases.