An evolutionary approach with diversity guarantee and well-informed grouping recombination for graph coloring

We present a diversity-oriented hybrid evolutionary approach for the graph coloring problem. This approach is based on both generally applicable strategies and specifically tailored techniques. Particular attention is paid to ensuring population diversity by carefully controlling spacing among individuals. Using a distance measure between potential solutions, the general population management strategy decides whether an offspring should be accepted in the population, which individual needs to be replaced and when mutation is applied. Furthermore, we introduce a special grouping-based multi-parent crossover operator which relies on several relevant features to identify meaningful building blocks for offspring construction. The proposed approach can be generally characterized as “well-informed”, in the sense that the design of each component is based on the most pertinent information which is identified by both experimental observation and careful analysis of the given problem. The resulting algorithm proves to be highly competitive when it is applied on the whole set of the DIMACS benchmark graphs.