An ant colony optimization algorithm for the min-degree constrained minimum spanning tree problem

Abstract

Given a connected edge-weighted undirected graph, the min-degree constrained minimum spanning tree (MDCMST) problem seeks on this graph a spanning tree of least cost in which every non-leaf node have a degree of at least d in the spanning tree. This problem is NP-Hard for 3 ≤ d ≤ ⌊n/2⌋ where n is the number of nodes in the graph. In this paper, we have proposed an ant colony optimization based approach to this problem. The proposed approach has been tested on Euclidean and random instances both. Computational results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.