Applying Genetic Algorithm to the Minimum Vertex Cover Problem

Let G = (V, E) be a simple undirected graph. The Minimum Vertex Cover (MVC) problem is to find a minimum subset C of V such that for every edge, at least one of its endpoints should be included in C. Like many other graph theoretic problems this problem is also known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm called LeafGA for MVC problem and show the performance of the proposed algorithm by applying it to several published benchmark graphs