Variable Neighborhood Search for the Vertex Separation Problem

The vertex separation problem belongs to a family of optimization problems in which the objective is to nd the best separator of vertices or edges in a generic graph. This optimization problem is strongly related to other well-known graph problems; such as the Path-Width, the Node Search Number or the Interval Thickness, among others. All of these optimization problems are NP-hard and have practical applications in VLSI, computer language compiler design or graph drawing. Up to know, they have been generally tackled with exact approaches, presenting polynomial-time algorithms to obtain the optimal solution for speci c types of graphs. However, in spite of their practical applications, these…