An artificial bee colony algorithm for the minimum routing cost spanning tree problem

Given a connected, weighted, and undirected graph, the minimum routing cost spanning tree problem seeks a spanning tree of minimum routing cost on this graph, where routing cost of a spanning tree is defined as the sum of the costs of the paths connecting all possible pairs of distinct vertices in that spanning tree. This problem has several important applications in networks design and computational biology. In this paper, we have proposed an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm-based approach for this problem. We have compared our approach against four best methods reported in the literature—two genetic algorithms, a stochastic hill climber and a perturbation-based local search. Computational results show the superiority of our ABC approach over other approaches.