In this paper we propose a memetic algorithm (MA) for the partition graph coloring problem. Given a clustered graph G = (V, E), the goal is to find a subset V * ⊂ V that contains exactly one node for each cluster and a coloring for V * so that in the graph induced by V * , two adjacent nodes have different colors and the total number of used colors is minimal. In our MA we use two distinct solution representations, one for the genetic operators and one for the local search procedure, which are

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... ailored for the corresponding situations, respectively. The algorithm is evaluated on a common benchmark instances set and the computational results show that compared to a state-of-the-art branch and cut algorithm, our MA achieves solid results in very short run-times.