An efficient memetic algorithm for the graph partitioning problem

Given a graph and an integer k , the goal of the graph partitioning problem is to find a partition of the vertex set in k classes, while minimizing the number of cut edges, and respecting a balance constraint between the classes. In this paper, we present a new memetic algorithm for the solution of the problem which uses both a tabu operator and a specialized crossover operator. The algorithm is tested by using the benchmarks of the graph partitioning archive. Our experiments show our memetic algorithm to outperform state-of-the-art algorithms proposed so far for the problem and to reach new records for a majority of the tested benchmarks instances.