A branch-and-bound algorithm for the mini-max spanning forest problem

The mini-max spanning forest problem requires to find a spanning forest of an undirected graph that minimizes the maximum of the costs of constituent trees. In a previous work we proved this problem NP-hard. In the current paper we present three lower bounds for this problem and develop a branch-and-bound algorithm to solve the problem exactly. The algorithm is implemented and numerical experiments are conducted on a series of test problems. The experiments compare the performances of the proposed bounds and search strategies in the algorithm as well as investigate the effects of instance characteristics on the behavior of the algorithm. Also, extension of the problem to the case of more than two root vertices as well as to the problem of determining the root locations are discussed.