A CS metaheuristic for the PFCLP

The Point-Feature Cartographic Label Placement (PFCLP) problem consists of placing text labels to point features on a map avoiding overlaps to improve map visualization. This paper presents a Clustering Search (CS) metaheuristic as a new alternative to solve the PFCLP problem. Computational experiments were performed over sets of instances with up to 13,206 points. These instances are the same used in sev- eral recent and important researches about the PFCLP problem. The results enhance the potential of CS by finding optimal solutions (proven in previous works) and improving the best-known solutions for instances whose optimal solutions are unknown so far.