A max-min ant colony optimization for undirected Steiner tree problem in graphs

The undirected Steiner tree problem in graphs is known to be NP-hard. The objective of this problem is to find a shortest tree containing a subset of nodes, called terminal nodes. This paper proposes a method based on a two-step procedure to solve this problem efficiently. In the first step, graph reduction rules eliminate useless nodes and edges which do not contribute to make an optimal solution. In the second step, a max-min ant colony optimization combined with Prim's algorithm is developed to solve the reduced problem. The proposed algorithm is tested in the sets of standard test problems. The results show that the algorithm efficiently presents very correct solutions to the benchmark problems.