GRASP Algorithms for the edge-survivable Generalized Steiner Problem

The design of a communication network where the connectivity between nodes must be kept even after failure of some links can be modeled as a Generalized Steiner Problem. It consists of computing the minimal cost subnetwork of a given feasible network where certain pairs of nodes must satisfy a number of disjoint connectivity requirements and is known to be an NP-Complete problem. This paper introduces an heuristic based on the combinatorial optimization metaheuristic “Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure” (GRASP) to solve the edge-survivable version of the problem, where nodes are perfect but links can fail. The algorithm is tested with a set of heterogeneous network topologies and connectivity requirements obtaining promising results; in all cases with known optimal cost, optimal or near-optimal solutions are found.

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