Ant colony optimization for the minimum-weight rooted arborescence problem

Abstract

The minimum-weight rooted arborescence problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem which has important applications, for example, in computer vision. An example of such an application is the automated reconstruction of consistent tree structures from noisy images. In this chapter, we present an ant colony optimization approach to tackle this problem. Ant colony op-timization is a metaheuristic which is inspired by the foraging behavior of ant colonies. By means of an extensive computational evaluation, we show that the proposed approach has advantages over an existing heuristic from the literature, especially for what concerns rather dense graphs.