A variable neighborhood search approach for the vertex bisection problem

In this paper we use Basic Variable Neighborhood Search (BVNS) methodology to solve the VBP. In particular, we propose three constructive procedures and six improvement methods. We introduce a novel scheme for calculating the objective function which substantially reduces the computing time as compared with the direct implementation. After a set of preliminary experiments, the best BVNS design is compared with the state-of-the-art over the same set of instances obtaining better results for both, quality of the solutions and execution time. These results are further confirmed by non-parametric statistical tests.