On exact solutions for the Minmax Regret Spanning Tree problem

Abstract

The Minmax Regret Spanning Tree problem is studied in this paper. This is a generalization of the well-known Minimum Spanning Tree problem, which considers uncertainty in the cost function. Particularly, it is assumed that the cost parameter associated with each edge is an interval whose lower and upper limits are known, and the Minmax Regret is the optimization criterion. The Minmax Regret Spanning Tree problem is an NP-Hard optimization problem for which exact and heuristic approaches have been proposed. Several exact algorithms are proposed and computationally compared with the most effective approaches of the literature. It is shown that a proposed branch-and-cut approach outperforms the previous approaches when considering several classes of instances from the literature. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.