Hybrid local search algorithms on Graph Coloring Problem

Hybridization of local search algorithms yield promising algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems such as Graph Coloring Problem (GCP). This paper presents a new meta-heuristic Simulated Annealing with Backtracking (SABT) and shows the effect of hill climber and tabu search on SABT for solving GCP. The algorithm proposed merges the power of simulated annealing approach and backtracking mechanism. Some hill climbers are integrated for fine tuning and also tabu search is integrated for avoiding from redundant search. Several tests are run on a collection of benchmarks from DIMACS challenge suite and promising results are obtained. A comparison of SABT framework with some other state-of-the-art algorithms is presented along with an analysis of the performance of the algorithm.