A branch-and-cut algorithm for the Steiner tree problem with delays

In this paper, we investigate the Steiner tree problem with delays, which is a generalized version of the Steiner tree problem applied to multicast routing. For this challenging combinatorial optimization problem, we present an enhanced directed cut-based MIP formulation and an exact solution method based on a branch-and-cut approach. Our computational study reveals that the proposed approach can optimally solve hard dense instances.     

Rectilinear group Steiner trees and applications in VLSI design

 Given a set of disjoint groups of points in the plane, the rectilinear group Steiner tree problem is the problem of finding a shortest interconnection (under the rectilinear metric) which includes at least one point from each group. This is an important generalization of the well-known rectilinear Steiner tree problem which has direct applications in VLSI design: in the detailed routing phase the logical units typically allow the nets to connect to several electrically equivalent ports. We present a first (tailored) exact algorithm for solving the rectilinear group Steiner tree problem (and related variants of the problem). The algorithm essentially constructs a subgraph of the corresponding Hanan grid on which existing algorithms for solving the Steiner tree problem in graphs are applied. The reductions of the Hanan grid are performed by applying point deletions and by generating full Steiner trees on the remaining points. Experimental results for real-world VLSI instances with up to 100 groups are presented. Received: November 7, 2000 / Accepted: December 19, 2001 Published online: September 5, 2002     

Decomposition methods for the two-stage stochastic Steiner tree problem

A new algorithmic approach for solving the stochastic Steiner tree problem based on three procedures for computing lower bounds (dual ascent, Lagrangian relaxation, Benders decomposition) is introduced. Our method is derived from a new integer linear programming formulation, which is shown to be strongest among all known formulations. The resulting method, which relies on an interplay of the dual information retrieved from the respective dual procedures, computes upper and lower bounds and combines them with several rules for fixing variables in order to decrease the size of problem instances. The effectiveness of our method is compared in an extensive computational study with the state-of-the-art exact approach, which employs a Benders decomposition based on two-stage branch-and-cut, and a genetic algorithm introduced during the DIMACS implementation challenge on Steiner trees. Our results indicate that the presented method significantly outperforms existing ones, both on benchmark instances from literature, as well as on large-scale telecommunication networks.     

Dijkstra meets Steiner: a fast exact goal-oriented Steiner tree algorithm

We present a new exact algorithm for the Steiner tree problem in edge-weighted graphs. Our algorithm improves the classical dynamic programming approach by Dreyfus and Wagner. We achieve a significantly better practical performance via pruning and future costs, a generalization of a well-known concept to speed up shortest path computations. Our algorithm matches the best known worst-case run time and has a fast, often superior, practical performance: on some large instances originating from VLSI design, previous best run times are improved upon by orders of magnitudes. We are also able to solve larger instances of the d-dimensional rectilinear Steiner tree problem for \(d \in \{3, 4, 5\}\), whose Hanan grids contain up to several millions of edges.     

A node-based layered graph approach for the Steiner tree problem with revenues,budget and hop-constraints

The Steiner tree problem with revenues, budget and hop-constraints (STPRBH) is a variant of the classical Steiner tree problem. The goal is to find a tree maximizing the collected revenue, which is associated with nodes, subject to a given budget for the edge cost of the tree and a hop-limit for the distance between the given root node and any other node in that tree. In this work, we introduce a novel generic way to model hop-constrained tree problems as integer linear programs and apply it to the STPRBH. Our approach is based on the concept of layered graphs that gained widespread attention in the recent years, due to their computational advantage when compared to previous formulations for modeling hop-constraints. Contrary to previous MIP formulations based on layered graphs (that are arc-based models), our model is node-based. Thus it contains much less variables and allows to tackle large-scale instances and/or instances with large hop-limits, for which the size of arc-based layered graph models may become prohibitive. The aim of our model is to provide a good compromise between quality of root relaxation bounds and the size of the underlying MIP formulation. We implemented a branch-and-cut algorithm for the STPRBH based on our new model. Most of the instances available for the DIMACS challenge, including 78 (out of 86) previously unsolved ones, can be solved to proven optimality within a time limit of 1000 s, most of them being solved within a few seconds only. These instances contain up to 500 nodes and 12,500 edges, with hop-limit up to 25.     

三维欧氏Steiner最小树的Delaunay四面体网格混合智能算法

Steiner最小树问题是组合优化中经典的NP难题,在许多实际问题中有着广泛的应用,而三维欧氏Steiner最小树问题是对二维欧氏Steiner最小树问题的推广。由于三维欧氏Steiner树问题的求解非常困难,至今为止的相关成果较为少见。本文针对该问题,利用Delaunay四面体网格剖分技术,提出了一种混合型智能求解方法,不仅可以尽量避免拓扑结构陷入局部最优,且对较大规模的问题求解亦有良好的效果。算法在Matlab环境下编程实现,经实例测试,获得了满意的效果。     

The Steiner connectivity problem

The Steiner connectivity problem has the same significance for line planning in public transport as the Steiner tree problem for telecommunication network design. It consists in finding a minimum cost set of elementary paths to connect a subset of nodes in an undirected graph and is, therefore, a generalization of the Steiner tree problem. We propose an extended directed cut formulation for the problem which is, in comparison to the canonical undirected cut formulation, provably strong, implying, e.g., a class of facet defining Steiner partition inequalities. Since a direct application of this formulation is computationally intractable for large instances, we develop a partial projection method to produce a strong relaxation in the space of canonical variables that approximates the extended formulation. We also investigate the separation of Steiner partition inequalities and give computational evidence that these inequalities essentially close the gap between undirected and extended directed cut formulation. Using these techniques, large Steiner connectivity problems with up to 900 nodes can be solved within reasonable optimality gaps of typically less than five percent.     

A new trust region technique for the maximum weight clique problem

A new simple generalization of the Motzkin-Straus theorem for the maximum weight clique problem is formulated and directly proved. Within this framework a trust region heuristic is developed. In contrast to usual trust region methods, it regards not only the global optimum of a quadratic objective over a sphere, but also a set of other stationary points of the program. We formulate and prove a condition when a Motzkin-Straus optimum coincides with such a point. The developed method has complexity O(n³), where n is the number of vertices of the graph. It was implemented in a publicly available software package QUALEX-MS.Computational experiments indicate that the algorithm is exact on small graphs and very efficient on the DIMACS benchmark graphs and various random maximum weight clique problem instances.     

On the Applicability of Lower Bounds for Solving Rectilinear Quadratic Assignment Problems in Parallel

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) belongs to the hard core of NP-hard optimization problems. After almost forty years of research only relatively small instances can be solved to optimality. The reason is that the quality of the lower bounds available for exact methods is not sufficient. Recently, lower bounds based on decomposition were proposed for the so called rectilinear QAP that proved to be the strongest for a large class of problem instances. We investigate the strength of these bounds when applied not only at the root node of a search tree but as the bound function used in a Branch-and-Bound code solving large scale QAPs.     

Computing optimal rectilinear Steiner trees: A survey and experimental evaluation

The rectilinear Steiner tree problem is to find a minimum-length rectilinear interconnection of a set of points in the plane. A reduction from the rectilinear Steiner tree problem to the graph Steiner tree problem allows the use of exact algorithms for the graph Steiner tree problem to solve the rectilinear problem. Furthermore, a number of more direct, geometric algorithms have been devised for computing optimal rectilinear Steiner trees. This paper surveys algorithms for computing optimal rectilinear Steiner trees and presents experimental results comparing nine of them: graph Steiner tree algorithms due to Beasley, Bern, Dreyfus and Wagner, Hakimi, and Shore, Foulds, and Gibbons and geometric algorithms due to Ganley and Cohoon, Salowe and Warme, and Thomborson, Alpern, and Carter.     

Finding all nondominated points of multi-objective integer programs

We develop exact algorithms for multi-objective integer programming (MIP) problems. The algorithms iteratively generate nondominated points and exclude the regions that are dominated by the previously-generated nondominated points. One algorithm generates new points by solving models with additional binary variables and constraints. The other algorithm employs a search procedure and solves a number of models to find the next point avoiding any additional binary variables. Both algorithms guarantee to find all nondominated points for any MIP problem. We test the performance of the algorithms on randomly-generated instances of the multi-objective knapsack, multi-objective shortest path and multi-objective spanning tree problems. The computational results show that the algorithms work well.     

The steiner tree packing problem in VLSI design

In this paper we describe several versions of the routing problem arising in VLSI design and indicate how the Steiner tree packing problem can be used to model these problems mathematically. We focus on switchbox routing problems and provide integer programming formulations for routing in the knock-knee and in the Manhattan model. We give a brief sketch of cutting plane algorithms that we developed and implemented for these two models. We report on computational experiments using standard test instances. Our codes are able to determine optimum solutions in most cases, and in particular, we can show that some of the instances have no feasible solution if Manhattan routing is used instead of knock-knee routing.     

Comparison of Algorithms for the Degree Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree

The Degree Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree (DCMST) on a graph is the problem of generating a minimum spanning tree with constraints on the number of arcs that can be incident to vertices of the graph. In this paper we develop three heuristics for the DCMST, including simulated annealing, a genetic algorithm and a method based on problem space search. We propose alternative tree representations to facilitate the neighbourhood searches for the genetic algorithm. The tree representation that we use for the genetic algorithm can be generalised to other tree optimisation problems as well. We compare the computational performance of all of these approaches against the performance of an exact solution approach in the literature. In addition, we also develop a new exact solution approach based on the combinatorial structure of the problem. We test all of these approaches using standard problems taken from the literature and some new test problems that we generate.     

An exact solution framework for the minimum cost dominating tree problem

The minimum cost dominating tree problem is a recently introduced NP-hard problem, which consists of finding a tree of minimal cost in a given graph, such that for every node of the graph, the node or one of its neighbours is in the tree. We present an exact solution framework combining a primal–dual heuristic with a branch-and-cut approach based on a transformation of the problem into a Steiner arborescence problem with an additional constraint. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated on testbeds proposed in literature containing instances with up to 500 nodes. Our framework manages to solve all but four instances from literature to proven optimality within 3 h (most of them in a few seconds). We provide optimal solution values for 69 instances from literature for which the optimal solution was previously unknown.     

Variable neighbourhood search for the minimum labelling Steiner tree problem

We present a study on heuristic solution approaches to the minimum labelling Steiner tree problem, an NP-hard graph problem related to the minimum labelling spanning tree problem. Given an undirected labelled connected graph, the aim is to find a spanning tree covering a given subset of nodes of the graph, whose edges have the smallest number of distinct labels. Such a model may be used to represent many real world problems in telecommunications and multimodal transportation networks. Several metaheuristics are proposed and evaluated. The approaches are compared to the widely adopted Pilot Method and it is shown that the Variable Neighbourhood Search that we propose is the most effective metaheuristic for the problem, obtaining high quality solutions in short computational running times.     

Solving weighted MAX-SAT via global equilibrium search

In this note we investigate the performance of global equilibrium search based heuristics on the weighted MAX-SAT problem. Three variants of the approach are implemented and compared with other existing algorithms on publicly available benchmark instances. The reported computational results indicate high efficiency of the method considered.     

Swap-vertex based neighborhood for Steiner tree problems

Steiner tree problems (STPs) are very important in both theory and practice. In this paper, we introduce a powerful swap-vertex move operator which can be used as a basic element of any neighborhood search heuristic to solve many STP variants. Given the incumbent solution tree T, the swap-vertex move operator exchanges a vertex in T with another vertex out of T, and then attempts to construct a minimum spanning tree, leading to a neighboring solution (if feasible). We develop a series of dynamic data structures, which allow us to efficiently evaluate the feasibility of swap-vertex moves. Additionally, in order to discriminate different swap-vertex moves corresponding to the same objective value, we also develop an auxiliary evaluation function. We present a computational assessment based on a number of challenging problem instances (corresponding to three representative STP variants) which clearly shows the effectiveness of the techniques introduced in this paper. Particularly, as a key element of our KTS algorithm which participated in the 11th DIMACS implementation challenge, the swap-vertex operator as well as the auxiliary evaluation function contributed significantly to the excellent performance of our algorithm.     

Steiner tree packing revisited

The Steiner tree packing problem (STPP) in graphs is a long studied problem in combinatorial optimization. In contrast to many other problems, where there have been tremendous advances in practical problem solving, STPP remains very difficult. Most heuristics schemes are ineffective and even finding feasible solutions is already NP-hard. What makes this problem special is that in order to reach the overall optimal solution non-optimal solutions to the underlying NP-hard Steiner tree problems must be used. Any non-global approach to the STPP is likely to fail. Integer programming is currently the best approach for computing optimal solutions. In this paper we review some ??classical?? STPP instances which model the underlying real world application only in a reduced form. Through improved modelling, including some new cutting planes, and by employing recent advances in solver technology we are for the first time able to solve those instances in the original 3D grid graphs to optimimality.     

Packing Steiner trees: a cutting plane algorithm and computational results

In this paper we describe a cutting plane algorithm for the Steiner tree packing problem. We use our algorithm to solve some switchbox routing problems of VLSI-design and report on our computational experience. This includes a brief discussion of separation algorithms, a new LP-based primal heuristic and implementation details. The paper is based on the polyhedral theory for the Steiner tree packing polyhedron developed in our companion paper (this issue) and meant to turn this theory into an algorithmic tool for the solution of practical problems.