An algorithmic strategy to select vertices as router candidates in a Steiner tree

Abstract

The Steiner tree problem in graphs is NP-Hard, so the development of algorithms that provide good polynomial-time solutions are desired. In this paper, we present a heuristic algorithm based on the concepts of an efficient exact enumerative algorithm proposed by Dourado et al (2014). Despite the existence of several approximation algorithms for this problem, we present a simple heuristic method and show that it achieves competitive results on benchmark instances from the literature, with an empirical average approximation ratio of no more than 1.01% and a maximum of 1.12%.