Memetic Algorithm for the Minimum Edge Dominating Set Problem

The minimum edge dominating set (MEDS) is one of the fundamental covering problems in graph theory, which finds many practical applications in diverse domains. In this paper, we propose a meta-heuristic approach based on genetic algorithm and local search to solve the MEDS problem. Therefore, the proposed method is considered as a memetic search algorithm which is called Memetic Algorithm for minimum edge dominating set (MAMEDS). In the MAMEDS method, a new fitness function is invoked to effectively measure the solution qualities. The search process in the proposed method uses intensification schemes beside the main genetic search operations in order to achieve faster performance. The experimental results proves that the proposed method is promising in solving the MEDS problem.