| Abstract: | The generalized Steiner problem (GSP) is concerned with the determination of a minimum cost subnetwork of a given network where some (not necessarily all) vertices satisfy certain pairwise (vertex or edge) connectivity requirements. The GSP has applications to the design of water and electricity supply networks, communication networks and other large-scale systems where connectivity requirements ensure the communication between the selected vertices when some vertices and/or edges can become inoperational due to scheduled maintenance, error, or overload. The GSP is known to be NP-complete. In this paper we show that if the subnetwork is required to be respectively biconnected and edge-biconnected, and the underlying network is series-parallel, both problems can be solved in linear time. |
