An Ant Colony Heuristic for the Design of Two-Edge Connected Flow Networks

We consider the problem of designing a reliable network defined as follows: Given an undirected graph, the objective of the problem is to find a minimum cost network configuration such that the flow balance equations are satisfied and the network is two-edge connected. The cost function for each edge consists of a fixed component and a variable component, which is proportional to the flow passing through the edge. We present a novel ant colony approach for the solution of the above problem. Computational experience is reported.