General swap-based multiple neighborhood tabu search for the maximum independent set problem

Given a graph G = (V,E), the Maximum Independent Set problem (MIS) aims to determine a subset S ⊆ V of maximum cardinality such that no two vertices of S are adjacent. This paper presents a general Swap-Based Tabu Search (SBTS) for solving the MIS. SBTS integrates distinguished features including a general and unified (k, 1)-swap operator, four constrained neighborhoods and specific rules for neighborhood exploration. Extensive evaluations on two popular benchmarks (DIMACS and BHOSLIB) of 120 instances show that SBTS attains the best-known results for all the instances. To our knowledge, such a performance was not reported in the literature for a single heuristic. The best-known results on 11 additional instances from code theory are also attained.