A new approach for solving the minimum vertex cover problem using artificial bee colony algorithm

The minimum vertex cover problem is a well-known problem in classical graph theory. It is known as one of the NP-Hard optimization problems, meaning that the best solution cannot be found within an acceptable time. Therefore, to handle this optimization problem effectively, various alternative approaches based on either approximation or metaheuristic techniques have been considered and proposed in the previous literature. However, developing more effective methods to deal with the problem of finding the minimum vertex cover is still challenging. This study proposes a strategy for tackling the minimum vertex cover problem based on the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. The main novelty and contribution of this research are to show that the ABC algorithm can be used as another useful and efficient way to solve the minimum vertex cover problem and also to demonstrate the application of the minimum vertex cover solutions to real-world wireless sensor network problems. The proposed method is evaluated by assessing the algorithm's performance based on an obtained set of optimal vertices and the amount of computation time in terms of the number of iterations. The empirical results show that the proposed approach can yield satisfactory results and outperform other existing algorithms in finding a set of optimal vertices.