<span lang="EN-US">This research focuses on the k-center problem and its applications. Different methods for solving this problem are analyzed. The implementations of an exact algorithm and of an approximate algorithm are presented. The source code and the computation complexity of these algorithms are presented and analyzed. The multitasking mode of the operating system is taken into account considering the execution time of the algorithms. The results show that the approximate algorithm finds solutions that are not worse than two times optimal. In some case these solutions are very close to the optimal solutions, but this is true only for graphs with a smaller number of nodes. As the number of nodes in the graph increases (respectively the number of edges increases), the approximate solutions deviate from the optimal ones, but remain acceptable. These results give reason to conclude that for graphs with a small number of nodes the approximate algorithm finds comparable solutions with those founds by the exact algorithm.</span>
This paper deals with an analysis of three algorithms for the graph vertex cover problem. Certain methods for solving this problem are analyzed. In addition, different studies on the problem and some approaches to its solution are discussed as well. An exact algorithm (based on the backtracking approach) is presented. Calculating the average time for execution of this algorithm is consistent with the multitasking way of work of the operating system. For this purpose, four different starts of the algorithm are made and then the average time of all of them is calculated. The exact algorithm found the optimal solutions for all analyzed graphs. Besides this algorithm, two other heuristic algorithms for solving the problem are discussed. For this study, an interactive application is developed to visualize the performance of the three algorithms and display the obtained results. The results show that for small graphs with no more than 25 vertices the exact algorithm can be used to solve optimally the graph vertex cover problem. For the largest graphs, none of the two heuristic algorithms found the optimal solutions, but these algorithms generated solutions that are very close to the optimal ones. In summary, when the size of the graph increases linearly, the execution time of the heuristic algorithms increases linearly, while the execution time of the exact algorithm increases exponentially.
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