Boosting Local Search for the Maximum Independent Set Problem

An independent set of a graph G = (V, E) with vertices V and edges E is a subset S ⊆ V, such that the subgraph induced by S does not contain any edges. The goal of the maximum independent set problem (MIS problem) is to find an independent set of maximum size. It is equivalent to the well-known vertex cover problem (VC problem) and maximum clique problem. This thesis consists of two main parts. In the first one we compare the currently best algorithms for finding near-optimal independent sets and vertex covers in large, sparse graphs. They are Iterated Local Search (ILS) by Andrade et al. [2], a heuristic that uses local search for the MIS problem and NuMVC by Cai et al. [6], a local search algorithm for the VC problem. As of now, there are no methods to solve these large instances exactly in any reasonable time. Therefore these heuristic algorithms are the best option. In the second part we analyze a series of techniques, some of which lead to a significant speed up of the ILS algorithm. This is done by removing specific ver