An edge-swap heuristic for generating spanning trees with minimum number of branch vertices

• Autor(a) principal: Silva,RMA
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Silva,DM, Resende,MGC, Mateus,GR, José Fernando Gonçalves, Festa,P
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.inesctec.pt/handle/123456789/5403; http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11590-013-0665-y

This paper presents a newedge-swap heuristic for generating spanning trees with a minimum number of branch vertices, i.e. vertices of degree greater than two. This problem was introduced in Gargano et al. (Lect Notes Comput Sci 2380:355-365, 2002) and has been called the minimum branch vertices problem by Cerulli et al. (Comput Optim Appl 42:353-370, 2009). The heuristic starts with a random spanning tree and iteratively reduces the number of branch vertices by swapping tree edges with edges not currently in the tree. It can be easily implemented as a multi-start heuristic. We report on extensive computational experiments comparing single-start and multi-start variants on our heuristic with other heuristics previously proposed in the literature.