Algorithms for the power-p Steiner tree problem in the Euclidean plane

We study the problem of constructing minimum power-$p$ Euclidean $k$-Steiner trees in the plane. The problem is to find a tree of minimum cost spanning a set of given terminals where, as opposed to the minimum spanning tree problem, at most $k$ additional nodes (Steiner points) may be introduced anywhere in the plane. The cost of an edge is its length to the power of $p$ (where $p\geq 1$), and the cost of a network is the sum of all edge costs. We propose two heuristics: a ``beaded" minimum spanning tree heuristic; and a heuristic which alternates between minimum spanning tree construction and a local fixed topology minimisation procedure for locating the Steiner points. We show that the performance ratio $\kappa$ of the beaded-MST heuristic satisfies $\sqrt{3}^{p-1}(1+2^{1-p})\leq \kappa\leq 3(2^{p-1})$. We then provide two mixed-integer nonlinear programming formulations for the problem, and extend several important geometric properties into valid inequalities. Finally, we combine the valid inequalities with warm-starting and preprocessing to obtain computational improvements for the $p=2$ case

Approximation algorithms for multi-dimensional assignment problems with decomposable costs

AbstractThe k-dimensional assignment problem with decomposable costs is formulated as follows. Given is a complete k-partite graph G = (X0 ∪ ⋯ ∪ Xk − 1, E), with |Xi| = p for each i, and a nonnegative length function defined on the edges of G. A clique of G is a subset of vertices meeting each Xi in exactly one vertex. The cost of a clique is a function of the lengths of the edges induced by the clique. Four specific cost functions are considered in this paper; namely, the cost of a clique is either the sum of the lengths of the edges induced by the clique (sum costs), or the minimum length of a spanning star (star costs) or of a traveling salesman tour (tour costs) or of a spanning tree (tree costs) of the induced subgraph. The problem is to find a minimum-cost partition of the vertex set of G into cliques. We propose several simple heuristics for this problem, and we derive worst-case bounds on the ratio between the cost of the solutions produced by these heuristics and the cost of an optimal solution. The worst-case bounds are stated in terms of two parameters, viz. k and τ, where the parameter τ indicates how close the edge length function comes to satisfying the triangle inequality

Improving the Asymmetric TSP by Considering Graph Structure

Recent works on cost based relaxations have improved Constraint Programming (CP) models for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). We provide a short survey over solving asymmetric TSP with CP. Then, we suggest new implied propagators based on general graph properties. We experimentally show that such implied propagators bring robustness to pathological instances and highlight the fact that graph structure can significantly improve search heuristics behavior. Finally, we show that our approach outperforms current state of the art results.Comment: Technical repor

Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search and Variable Neighbourhood Search for the minimum labelling spanning tree problem

This paper studies heuristics for the minimum labelling spanning tree (MLST) problem. The purpose is to find a spanning tree using edges that are as similar as possible. Given an undirected labelled connected graph, the minimum labelling spanning tree problem seeks a spanning tree whose edges have the smallest number of distinct labels. This problem has been shown to be NP-hard. A Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) and a Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) are proposed in this paper. They are compared with other algorithms recommended in the literature: the Modified Genetic Algorithm and the Pilot Method. Nonparametric statistical tests show that the heuristics based on GRASP and VNS outperform the other algorithms tested. Furthermore, a comparison with the results provided by an exact approach shows that we may quickly obtain optimal or near-optimal solutions with the proposed heuristics

Heuristics based on greedy randomized adaptive search and variable neighbourhood search for the minimum labelling spanning tree problem

This paper studies heuristics for the minimum labelling spanning tree (MLST) problem. The purpose is to find a spanning tree using edges that are as similar as possible. Given an undirected labelled connected graph, the minimum labelling spanning tree problem seeks a spanning tree whose edges have the smallest number of distinct labels. This problem has been shown to be NP-complete. A Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) and different versions of Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) are proposed. They are compared with other algorithms recommended in the literature: the Modified Genetic Algorithm and the Pilot Method. Nonparametric statistical tests show that the heuristics based on GRASP and VNS outperform the other algorithms tested. Furthermore, a comparison with the results provided by an exact approach shows that we may quickly obtain optimal or near-optimal solutions with the proposed heuristics

Variable neighbourhood search for the minimum labelling Steiner tree problem

We present a study on heuristic solution approaches to the minimum labelling Steiner tree problem, an NP-hard graph problem related to the minimum labelling spanning tree problem. Given an undirected labelled connected graph, the aim is to find a spanning tree covering a given subset of nodes of the graph, whose edges have the smallest number of distinct labels. Such a model may be used to represent many real world problems in telecommunications and multimodal transportation networks. Several metaheuristics are proposed and evaluated. The approaches are compared to the widely adopted Pilot Method and it is shown that the Variable Neighbourhood Search that we propose is the most effective metaheuristic for the problem, obtaining high quality solutions in short computational running time