A path cost-based GRASP for minimum independent dominating set problem

The minimum independent dominating set problem (MIDS) is an extension of the classical dominating set problem with wide applications. In this paper, we describe a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) with path cost heuristic for MIDS, as well as the classical tabu mechanism. Our novel GRASP algorithm makes better use of the vertex neighborhood information provided by path cost and thus is able to discover better and more solutions and to escape from local optimal solutions when the original GRASP fails to find new improved solutions. Moreover, to further overcome the serious cycling problem, the tabu mechanism is employed to forbid some just-removed vertices back to the candidate solution. Computational experiments carried out on standard benchmarks, namely DIMACS instances, show that our algorithm consistently outperforms two MIDS solvers as well as the original GRASP.