A constraint-based local search for edge disjoint rooted distance-constrained minimum spanning tree problem

Abstract

Many network design problems arising in areas as diverse as VLSI circuit design, QoS routing, traffic engineering, and computational sustainability require clients to be connected to a facility under path-length constraints and budget limits. These problems can be modelled as Rooted Distance-Constrained Minimum Spanning-Tree Problem (RDCMST), which is NP-hard. An inherent feature of these networks is that they are vulnerable to a failure. Therefore, it is often important to ensure that all clients are connected to two or more facilities via edge-disjoint paths. We call this problem the Edge-disjoint RDCMST (ERDCMST). Previous works on RDCMST have focused on dedicated algorithms which are hard to extend with side constraints, and therefore these algorithms cannot be extended for solving ERDCMST. We present a constraint-based local search algorithm for which we present two efficient local move operators and an incremental way of maintaining objective function. Our local search algorithm can easily be extended and it is able to solve both problems. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by experimenting with a set of problem instances taken from real-world passive optical network deployments in Ireland, the UK, and Italy. We compare our approach with existing exact and heuristic approaches. Results show that our approach is superior to both of the latter in terms of scalability and its anytime behaviour.