Branch and bound for the cutwidth minimization problem

The cutwidth minimization problem consists of finding a linear arrangement of the vertices of a graph where the maximum number of cuts between the edges of the graph and a line separating consecutive vertices is minimized. We first review previous approaches for special classes of graphs, followed by lower bounds and then a linear integer formulation for the general problem. We then propose a branch‐and‐bound algorithm based on different lower bounds on the cutwidth of partial solutions. Additionally, we introduce a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) heuristic to obtain good initial solutions. The combination of the branch‐and‐bound and GRASP methods results in optimal solutions or a reduced relative gap (difference between upper and lower bounds) on the instances tested. Empirical results with a collection of previously reported instances indicate that the proposed algorithm is able to solve all the small instances (up to 32 vertices) as well as some of the large instances tested (up to 158 vertices) using less than 30 minutes of CPU time. We compare the results of our method with previous lower bounds, and with the best previous linear integer formulation solved using Cplex. Both comparisons favor the proposed procedure.