A Hybrid Discrete Flower Pollination Algorithm for Graph Coloring Problem

Flower pollination algorithm is a recent nature inspired algorithm for continuous optimization problems. This algorithm is inspired by the pollination process of flowers. In this paper, we introduce for the first time a hybrid discrete version of the algorithm to deal with the graph coloring problem. The proposed algorithm uses swap and inversion strategies and adapts the efficient constructive method called RLF (Recursive Largest First) to deal with invalid solutions. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on benchmark instances set and the preliminary results show promising results where it achieves the exact solution in almost cases.