A greedy heuristic for the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem

This paper develops a greedy heuristic for the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem (CMSTP), based on the two widely known methods of Prim and of Esau–Williams. The proposed algorithm intertwines two-stages: an enhanced combination of the Prim and Esau–Williams approaches via augmented and synt...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 68; no. 10; pp. 1223 - 1235
Main Authors Kritikos, M., Ioannou, G.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Taylor & Francis 01.10.2017
Taylor & Francis, Ltd
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Business and Management
capacitated minimum spanning tree problem
Computation
Esau-Williams heuristic
Extreme values
Heuristic
Management
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Prim's algorithm
Production scheduling
Solution space
Esau-Williams heuristic
Prim’s algorithm
capacitated minimum spanning tree problem
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Summary:This paper develops a greedy heuristic for the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem (CMSTP), based on the two widely known methods of Prim and of Esau–Williams. The proposed algorithm intertwines two-stages: an enhanced combination of the Prim and Esau–Williams approaches via augmented and synthetic node selection criteria, and an increase of the feasible solution space by perturbing the input data using the law of cosines. Computational tests on benchmark problems show that the new heuristic provides extremely good performance results for the CMSTP, justifying its effectiveness and robustness. Furthermore, excluding the feasible space expansion, we show that we can still obtain good quality solutions in very short computational times.
ISSN:0160-5682
1476-9360
DOI:10.1057/s41274-016-0146-7