Solving the Longest Simple Path Problem with Constraint-Based Techniques

The longest simple path problem on graphs arises in a variety of context, e.g., information retrieval, VLSI design, robot patrolling. Given an undirected weighted graph G = (V, E), the problem consists of finding the longest simple path (i.e., no vertex occurs more than once) on G. We propose in this paper an exact and a tabu search algorithm for solving this problem. We show that our techniques give competitive results on different kinds of graphs, compared with recent genetic algorithms