A heuristic procedure for the Capacitated m-Ring-Star problem

Zahra Naji-Azimi, Majid Salari and Paolo Toth

European Journal of Operational Research, 2010, vol. 207, issue 3, 1227-1234

Abstract: In this paper we propose a heuristic method to solve the Capacitated m-Ring-Star Problem which has many practical applications in communication networks. The problem consists of finding m rings (simple cycles) visiting a central depot, a subset of customers and a subset of potential (Steiner) nodes, while customers not belonging to any ring must be "allocated" to a visited (customer or Steiner) node. Moreover, the rings must be node-disjoint and the number of customers allocated or visited in a ring cannot be greater than the capacity Q given as an input parameter. The objective is to minimize the total visiting and allocation costs. The problem is a generalization of the Traveling Salesman Problem, hence it is NP-hard. In the proposed heuristic, after the construction phase, a series of different local search procedures are applied iteratively. This method incorporates some random aspects by perturbing the current solution through a "shaking" procedure which is applied whenever the algorithm remains in a local optimum for a given number of iterations. Computational experiments on the benchmark instances of the literature show that the proposed heuristic is able to obtain, within a short computing time, most of the optimal solutions and can improve some of the best known results.

Keywords: Capacitated; m-Ring-Star; problem; Heuristic; algorithms; Networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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