This report studies constructive heuristics for the minimum labelling spanning tree
(MLST) problem. The purpose is to find a spanning tree that uses edges that are as similar as
possible. Given an undirected labeled connected graph (i.e., with a label or color for each edge),
the minimum labeling spanning tree problem seeks a spanning tree whose edges have the smallest
possible number of distinct labels. The model can represent many real-world problems in
telecommunication networks, electric networks, and multimodal transportation networks, among
others, and the problem has been shown to be NP-complete even for complete graphs. A primary
heuristic, named the maximum vertex covering algorithm has been proposed. Several versions of
this constructive heuristic have been proposed to improve its efficiency. Here we describe the
problem, review the literature and compare some variants of this algorithm