A Dynamically Turbo-Charged Greedy Heuristic for Graph Coloring

Abstract

We introduce a dynamic version of the graph coloring problem and prove its fixed-parameter tractability with respect to the editparameter. This is used to present a turbo-charged heuristic for the problem that works by combining the turbo-charging technique with other standard heuristic tools, including greedy coloring. The recently introduced turbo-charging idea is further enhanced in this paper by introducing a dynamic version of the so called moment of regret and rollback points. Experiments comparing the presented turbo-charging algorithm to other (non-turbo-charged) heuristics demonstrate its effectiveness. Our algorithm often produced results that were either exact or better than all the other available heuristics.