Construct, Merge, Solve and Adapt Applied to the Maximum Disjoint Dominating Sets Problem

We propose a “construct, merge, solve and adapt” (CMSA) approach for the maximum disjoint dominating sets problem (MDDSP), which is a complex variant of the classical minimum dominating set problem in undirected graphs. The problem requires to find as many vertex-disjoint dominating sets of a given graph as possible. CMSA is a recent metaheuristic approach based on the idea of problem instance reduction. At each iteration of the algorithm, sub-instances of the original problem instance are solved by an exact solver. These sub-instances are obtained by merging the solution components of probabilistically generated solutions. CMSA is the first metaheuristic proposed for solving the MDDSP. The obtained results show that CMSA outperforms all existing greedy heuristics.