Towards faster local search for minimum weight vertex cover on massive graphs

The minimum weight vertex cover (MWVC) problem is a well known NP-hard problem with various real-world applications. In this paper, we design an efficient algorithm named FastWVC to solve MWVC problem in massive graphs. To this end, we propose a construction procedure, which aims to generate a quality initial vertex cover in short time. We also propose a new exchange step for reconstructing a vertex cover. Additionally, a cost-effective strategy is used for choosing adding vertices, which can accelerate the algorithm. Experiments on 102 instances were conducted to confirm the effectiveness of our algorithm. The results show that the FastWVC algorithm outperforms other algorithms in terms of both solution quality and computational time in most of the instances. We also carry out experiments that analyze the effectiveness of the underlying ideas.