In a recent paper, a solution approach to the Maximum Happy Vertices Problem has
been proposed. The approach is based on a constructive heuristic improved by a
matheuristic local search phase. We propose a new procedure able to outperform
the previous solution algorithm both in terms of solution quality and computational
time. Our approach is based on simple ingredients implying as starting solution gen-
erator an approximation algorithm and as an improving phase a new matheuristic
local search. The procedure is then extended to a multi-start configuration, able to
further improve the solution quality at the cost of an acceptable increase in compu-
tational time
