Recent Trends and Developments in Graph Coloring

Abstract

This paper is intended to give review of various heuristics and metaheuristics methods to graph coloring problem. The graph coloring problem is one of the combinatorial optimization problems used widely. It is a fundamental and significant problem in scientific computation and engineering design. The graph coloring problem is an NP-hard problem and can be explained as given an undirected graph, one has to find the least number of colors for coloring the vertices of the graph such that the two adjacent vertices must have different color. The minimum number of colors needed to color a graph is called its chromatic number. In this paper, a brief survey of various methods is given to solve graph coloring problem. Basically we have categorized it into three parts namely heuristic method, metaheuristic methods and hybrid methods. This paper surveys and analyzes various methods with an emphasis on recent developments.