The Steiner tree problem is a challenging NP-hard problem. Many hard instances of this problem are publicly available, that are still unsolved by state-of-theart branch-and-cut codes. A typical strategy to attack these instances is to enrich the polyhedral description of the problem, and/or to implement more and more sophisticated separation procedures and branching strategies. In this paper we investigate the opposite viewpoint, and try to make the solution method as simple as possible while working on the modeling side. Our working hypothesis is that the extreme hardness of

In this work we present a branch-and-bound (B&B) framework for the asymmetric prizecollecting Steiner tree problem (APCSTP). Several well-known network design problems can be transformed to the APCSTP, including the Steiner tree problem (STP), prize-collecting Steiner tree problem (PCSTP), maximum-weight connected subgraph problem (MWCS) and the nodeweighted Steiner tree problem (NWSTP). The main component of our framework is a new dual ascent algorithm for the rooted APCSTP, which generalizes Wong's dual ascent algorithm for the Steiner arborescence problem. The lower bounds and dual information obtained from the algorithm are exploited within powerful bound-based reduction tests and for guiding primal heuristics. The framework is complemented by additional alternative-based reduction tests. All tests are applied in every node of the B&B tree. Extensive computational results on benchmark instances for the PCSTP, MWCS and NWSTP indicate the framework's effectiveness, as most instances from literature are solved to optimality within seconds, including most of the (previously unsolved) largest instances from the recent DIMACS Challenge on Steiner Trees. In many cases the framework even manages to outperform recently proposed state-of-the-art exact and heuristic algorithms. Since the network design problems addressed in this work are frequently used for modeling various real-world applications (e.g., in bioinformatics), the presented B&B framework will also be made publicly available.

In this work, we present an algorithmic framework based on Benders decomposition for the Capacitated p-Cable Trench Problem with Covering. We show that our approach can be applied to most variants of the Cable Trench Problem (CTP) that have been considered in the literature. The proposed algorithm is augmented with a stabilization procedure to accelerate the convergence of the cut loop and with a primal heuristic to derive high-quality primal solutions. Three different variants of the CTP are considered in a computational study which compares the Benders approach with two compact integer linear programming formulations that are solved with CPLEX. The obtained results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the two compact models and that it can be used to tackle significantly larger instances than previously considered algorithms based on Lagrangean relaxation.

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A new algorithmic approach for solving the stochastic Steiner tree problem based on three procedures for computing lower bounds (dual ascent, Lagrangian relaxation, Benders decomposition) is introduced. Our method is derived from a new integer linear programming formulation, which is shown to be strongest among all known formulations. The resulting method, which relies on an interplay of the dual information retrieved from the respective dual procedures, computes upper and lower bounds and combines them with several rules for fixing variables in order to decrease the size of problem instances. The effectiveness of our method is compared in an extensive computational study with the state-of-the-art exact approach, which employs a Benders decomposition based on two-stage branch-and-cut, and a genetic algorithm introduced during the DIMACS implementation challenge on Steiner trees. Our results indicate that the presented method significantly outperforms existing ones, both on benchmark instances from literature, as well as on large-scale telecommunication networks.