Circular coloring of graphs via linear programming and tabu search

摘要

Circular coloring is a popular branch of graph theory which has been exhaustively studied for two decades mainly from a theoretical perspective. Since it is a refinement of the traditional proper coloring, it provides a more accurate model for cyclic scheduling problems which often arise in industrial applications. The present paper briefly surveys a special class of open shop scheduling that can be solved via circular coloring, and then proposes a new mathematical programming model and tabu search algorithm to compute the circular chromatic number of a graph effectively.