An Evolutionary Heuristic for the Maximum Independent Set Problem

|The results obtained from the application of a genetic algorithm, GENEsYs, to the NP-complete maximum independent set problem are reported in this work. In contrast to many other genetic algorithm based approaches that use domain-speciic knowledge, the approach presented here relies on a graded penalty term component of the tness function to penalize infeasible solutions. The method is applied to several large problem instances of the maximum independent set problem. The results clearly indicate that genetic algorithms can be successfully used as heuristics for nding good approximative solutions for this highly constrained optimization problem.