A VNS Metaheuristic with Stochastic Steps for Max 3-Cut and Max 3-Section

Abstract EN

A heuristic algorithm based on VNS is proposed to solve the Max 3-cut and Max 3-section problems.

By establishing a neighborhood structure of the Max 3-cut problem, we propose a local search algorithm and a variable neighborhood global search algorithm with two stochastic search steps to obtain the global solution.

We give some numerical results and comparisons with the well-known 0.836-approximate algorithm.

Numerical results show that the proposed heuristic algorithm can obtain efficiently the high-quality solutions and has the better numerical performance than the 0.836-approximate algorithm for the NP-Hard Max 3-cut and Max 3-section problems.