Multiobjective genetic search for spanning tree problem

Abstract

A major challenge to solving multiobjective optimization problems is to capture possibly all the (representative) equivalent and diverse solutions at convergence. In this paper, we attempt to solve the generic multi-objective spanning tree (MOST) problem using an evolutionary algorithm (EA). We consider, without loss of generality, edge-cost and tree-diameter as the two objectives, and use a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) that produces diverse solutions without needing a priori knowledge of the solution space. We test this approach for generating (near-) optimal spanning trees, and compare the solutions obtained from other conventional approaches.