The hop-constrained minimum cost flow spanning tree problem with nonlinear costs: an ant colony optimization approach

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2015

Authors

Monteiro, MSR (Author) Other; Dalila B.M.M. Fontes (Author) FEP; fontes, facc (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: Optimization Letters

Vol. 9

Pages: 451-464

ISSN: 1862-4472

Publisher: Springer Nature

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 2 Citations

Scopus - 5 Citations

Scientific classification

FOS: Social sciences > Economics and Business

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00A-7XW

DOI: 10.1007/s11590-014-0762-6

Abstract (EN): In this work we address the Hop-Constrained Minimum cost Flow Spanning Tree (HMFST) problem with nonlinear costs. The HMFST problem is an extension of the Hop-Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree problem since it considers flow requirements other than unit flows. We propose a hybrid heuristic, based on ant colony optimization and on local search, to solve this class of problems given its combinatorial nature and also that the total costs are nonlinearly flow dependent with a fixed-charge component. We solve a set of benchmark problems available online and compare the results obtained with the ones reported in the literature for a Multi-Population hybrid biased random key Genetic Algorithm (MPGA). Our algorithm proved to be able to find an optimum solution in more than 75 % of the runs, for each problem instance solved, and was also able to improve on many results reported for the MPGA. Furthermore, for every single problem instance we were able to find a feasible solution, which was not the case for the MPGA. Regarding running times, our algorithm improves upon the computational time used by CPLEX and was always lower than that of the MPGA.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 14