Graph minimum linear arrangement by multilevel weighted edge contractions

The minimum linear arrangement problem is widely used and studied in many practical and theoretical applications. In this paper we present a linear-time algorithm for the problem inspired by the algebraic multigrid approach which is based on weighted edge contraction rather than simple contraction. Our results turned out to be better than every known result in almost all cases, while the short running time of the algorithm enabled experiments with very large graphs. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.