Robles, MarcosCavero, SergioPardo, Eduardo G.Cordón, Oscar2025-05-192025-05-192025-07Marcos Robles, Sergio Cavero, Eduardo G. Pardo, Oscar Cordón, Multi-armed bandit for the cyclic minimum sitting arrangement problem, Computers & Operations Research, Volume 179, 2025, 107034, ISSN 0305-0548, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2025.1070341873-765X (online)0305-0548 (print)https://hdl.handle.net/10115/86397Graphs are commonly used to represent related elements and relationships among them. Signed graphs are a special type of graphs that can represent more complex structures, such as positive or negative connections in a social network. In this work, we address a combinatorial optimization problem, known as the Cyclic Minimum Sitting Arrangement, that consists of embedding a signed input graph into a cycle host graph, trying to locate in the embedding positive connected vertices closer than negative ones. This problem is a variant of the well-known Minimum Sitting Arrangement where the host graph has the structure of a path graph. To tackle the problem, we propose an algorithm based on the Multi-Armed Bandit method that combines three greedy-randomized constructive procedures with a Variable Neighborhood Descent local search algorithm. To assess the merit of our proposal, we compare it with the state-of-the-art method. Our experiments show that our algorithm outperforms the best-known method in the literature to date, and the results are statistically significant, establishing itself as the new state of the art for the problem.enAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Signed graphsCyclic minimum sitting arrangementMulti-armed banditVariable neighborhood descentArticlehttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2025.107034info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess