Lagrangian Relaxation for Maximum Graph Bisection Problem

Parag C. Pendharkar Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg (Information Systems)

Overview Maximum graph bisection problem (MGBP) is a widely studied problem in computer science and applied mathematics literature. It is well known that large size MGBPs are very difficult to solve using traditional optimization procedure and it is customary to use heuristics to obtain heuristic solutions. To compare the quality of a heuristic solution, an upper bound on the optimal solution of MGBP is necessary. A heuristic solution that is closer to the upper bound is considered to be of high quality. There are several approaches that can be used to compute upper bounds for the MGBP. Among these approaches are linear programming (LP) relaxation, semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxations, and lagrangian relaxation (LR). MGBP is a non-linear programming problem, it has to be converted to an equivalent linear programming problem so that LP relaxation and LR upper bounds can be obtained. In this research, I convert the MGBP into an equivalent linear programming problem and compute LP relaxation and LR upper bounds for the MGBP. These upper bounds are compared with the SDP relaxation upper bounds using several large-sized graphs from the literature. The results of my experiments indicate that for grid graphs, LP relaxation works very well and generally outperforms other two upper bounds. However, for randomly generated graphs, both SDP and LR work well and there is no clear winner. For caterpillar graphs, LR outperforms the other two upper bounds. When compared to the SDP relaxation, LR is very efficient and can provide solution to large sized MGBP containing significantly larger than 1000 vertices. The relative gap between the upper bound obtained by the LR and the lower bound obtained by the Kernighan-Lin (KL) heuristic, for all the graphs used in the research, is less than 4.7%, which indicates that the LR upper bounds are very tight. Acknowledgements Graph problems and related literature were provided by Dr. Thang Bui (Computer Science, PSU Harrisburg). I thank the Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure (RCC) group, a unit of ITS Penn State, for their computing and consulting support.

http://rcc.its.psu.edu/hpc