Path Relinking for Bandwidth Coloring Problem

A Path Relinking algorithm is proposed for the Bandwidth Coloring problem and the Bandwidth MultiColoring problem. It combines a population based relinking method and a tabu search based local search procedure. The proposed algorithm is assessed on two sets of 66 benchmark instances commonly used in the literature. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is highly competitive in terms of both solution quality and efficiency compared to the best performing algorithms in the literature. Specifically, it improves the previous best known results for 15 out of 66 instances, while matching the previous best known results for 47 cases. Some key elements of the proposed algorithm are investigated.