A metaheuristic based on fusion and fission for partitioning problems

Metaheuristics are very useful methods because they can find (approximate) solutions of a great variety of problems. One of them, which interests us, is graph partitioning. We present a new metaheuristic based on nuclear fusion and fission of atoms. This metaheuristic, called fusion fission, is compared to other classical algorithms. First, we present spectral and multilevel algorithms which are used to solve partitioning problems. Secondly, we present two metaheuristics applied to partitioning problems: simulated annealing and ant colony algorithms. We show that fusion fission gives good results, compared to the other algorithms. We demonstrate on a problem of air traffic control that metaheuristics methods can give better results than specific methods