Computing Generalized Minimum Spanning Trees with Variable Neighborhood Search.pdfVIP

Computing Generalized Minimum Spanning Trees with Variable Neighborhood Search Bin Hu, Markus Leitner, G¨unther R. Raidl∗ Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria {hu|raidl}@ads.tuwien.ac.at Abstract In the generalized version of the classical Minimum Spanning Tree problem, the nodes of a graph are partitioned into clusters and exactly one node from each cluster must be connected. This problem plays, for example, a role in the design of backbones in larger communication networks. We present a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) approach for this problem which is based on two different neighborhood types working in complementary ways to maximize the efficiency gained from the VNS concept. Both types of neighborhoods are large in the sense that they contain exponentially many candidate solutions, but efficient polynomial-time algorithms are used to identify best neighbors. Tests on Euclidean and random instances indicate in particular on instances with many nodes per cluster significant advantages of our VNS over previously published metaheuristic approaches. Keywords: Generalized Minimum Spanning Tree, Variable Neighborhood Search, Dynamic Pro- gramming 1 Introduction The Generalized Minimum Spanning Tree (GMST) problem is an extension of the classical Mini- mum Spanning Tree (MST) problem and is defined as follows. We consider a weighted complete ∗This work is supported by the RTN ADONET under grant 504438 and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant P16263-N04.