An Interactive Application for Learning and Analyzing Different Graph Vertex Cover Algorithms

Abstract

This paper deals with an analysis of three algorithms for the graph vertex cover problem. Certain methods for solving this problem are analyzed. In addition, different studies on the problem and some approaches to its solution are discussed as well. An exact algorithm (based on the backtracking approach) is presented. Calculating the average time for execution of this algorithm is consistent with the multitasking way of work of the operating system. For this purpose, four different starts of the algorithm are made and then the average time of all of them is calculated. The exact algorithm found the optimal solutions for all analyzed graphs. Besides this algorithm, two other heuristic algorithms for solving the problem are discussed. For this study, an interactive application is developed to visualize the performance of the three algorithms and display the obtained results. The results show that for small graphs with no more than 25 vertices the exact algorithm can be used to solve optimally the graph vertex cover problem. For the largest graphs, none of the two heuristic algorithms found the optimal solutions, but these algorithms generated solutions that are very close to the optimal ones. In summary, when the size of the graph increases linearly, the execution time of the heuristic algorithms increases linearly, while the execution time of the exact algorithm increases exponentially.