An Ant Colony Optimization Approach to the Degree-Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree Problem

This paper presents the application of an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm approach for communications networks design problem. We explore the use of ACO’s for solving a network optimization problem, the degree-constrained minimum spanning tree problem (d-MST), which is a NP-Hard problem. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through two kinds of data set: structured hard (SHRD) complete graphs and misleading (M-graph) complete graphs. Empirical results show that ACO performs competitively with other approaches based on evolutionary algorithm (EA) on certain instance set problem.