A Dynamically Turbo-Charged Greedy Heuristic for Graph Coloring

Abstract: We introduce a dynamic version of the graph coloring problem and prove its fixed-parameter tractability with respect to the edit-parameter. This is used to present a {\em turbo-charged} heuristic for the problem that works by combining the turbo-charging technique with other standard heuristic tools, including greedy coloring. The recently introduced turbo-charging idea is further enhanced in this paper by introducing a dynamic version of the so called {\em moment of regret} and {\em rollback points}. Experiments comparing our turbo-charging algorithm to other heuristics demonstrate its effectiveness. Our algorithm often produced results that were either exact or better than all the other available heuristics.