An Ant Algorithm for the Partition Graph Coloring Problem

In this paper we propose an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm for the partition graph coloring problem (PGCP). Given an undirected graph G = (V, E), whose nodes are partition into a given number of the node sets. The goal of the PGCP is to find a subset V* subset of V that contains exactly one node for each cluster and a coloring for V* so that in the graph induced by V *, two adjacent nodes have different colors and the total number of used colors is minimal. The performance of our algorithm is evaluated on a common benchmark instances set and the computational results show that compared to a state-of-the-art algorithms, our ACO algorithm achieves solid results in very short run-times.