LibMVC is a collection of fast iterative minimum vertex cover solvers. Currently the following algorithms are implemented:

• NuMVC
• FastVC

The solvers take a graph in DIMACS format as input and calculate the minimum vertex cover / independent set. During the calculation, approximations are provided.

This is a minimal example to get the independent set from a graph, stored as DIMACS file:

#include <fstream>
#include "numvc.hpp"

using namespace libmvc;

// file in DIMACS format
std::ifstream file(filename, std::ios::in);
NuMVC solver(file, optimal_size, std::chrono::seconds(cutoff_time), true);
solver.cover_LS(NuMVC::default_stats_printer);
const auto & solution = solver.get_independent_set();

For a more extensive example, look at the standalone implementation. This also shows how to get statistics regarding the performance of the solver.

The library includes an adapter for parallelizing any LibMVC interface compatible solver:

ParallelSolverAdapter<NuMVC> solver(...);

The interface of the adapter itself fulfills the LibMVC interface as well. If not set, the adapter uses as many parallel solvers as the system provides CPU cores.

All solvers are implemented as header only C++14 libraries. Just incluce LibMVC/<solver>.hpp in your project. The tests and benchmarks are build using meson. You can also install LibMVC with meson. If you use meson for your project, you can pull in this project using a wrap.

Each solver is also shipped with a standalone version. To use it call make in the standalone folder (or use meson).

For building the benchmarks, see the corresponding section below.

To build the documentation for all headers using doxygen, call ninja doc in the build directory.

The standalone version calculates the MVC of a graph given as a text file in dimacs format.

Example using the NuMVC solver:

make
# read file frb45-21-1.mis
# stop calculation only if time is up
# use 10 seconds for calculation
./numvc frb45-21-1.mis 0 10

Integration with BGL

For integration with the Boost Graph Library (BGL) a converter is provided in this gist.

// convert graph to dimacs
std::stringstream os;
write_dimacs(col_graph, os);

// initialize solver and solve
NuMVC solver(os, boost::num_vertices(col_graph)-size_is, max_sec, verbose);
solver.cover_LS();
std::vector<int> solution = std::move(solver.get_independent_set());

Benchmarks are provided for all solvers, using the google benchmark library. To simplify building and also as a good starting point, the build.sh script can be used.

To keep the repository small, only a small sample graph is included in bench/data. More and larger graphs can be downloaded using bench/fetch_graphs.sh.

For running the benchmarks, see this example:

# Usage: LibMVC-bench <graph> <minimum-cover> <timeout (sec)> <gbench parameters>
./bench/LibMVC-bench data/frb45-21-mis/frb45-21-1.mis 900 100 --benchmark_repetitions=5

The vertices of the DIMACS files are indexed starting at 1, however internally the the indexing starts at 0. For convenience the methods for getting the solution as indepentent set or cover provide a parameter to specify the indexing (default 1).

For more standalone solvers see also http://lcs.ios.ac.cn/~caisw/MVC.html