Exact and Heuristic Solutions to the Connected k-Partitioning Problem

Abstract

We study the problem of partitioning a graph into k connected components, which may also be referred to as the maximum k-cutset problem. Firstly, we present an exact algorithm and a variant, both implemented as integer linear programming (ILP) models. We then present a heuristic approach that will be seen to be extremely competitive with the exact algorithm for the ranges of graph under consideration.