“…For example, in transportation, telecommunication or oil supply networks, the linear function represents the costs for building each road, communication link or pipe, and the quadratic function represents the extra costs needed for transferring from one road (link, pipe) to another one. Normally, the interference costs are limited to pairs of adjacent edges (Maia, Goldbarg, & Goldbarg, 2013;Pereira, Gendreau, & Cunha, 2013), but in some special cases, the interference costs also exist between any pair of edges, especially for situations where the topology has little relation to the physical layout. As discussed in (Assad & Xu, 1992;Öncan & Punnen, 2010; Palubeckis, Rubliauskas, & Targamadzè, 2010), the QMSTP has several equivalent formulations such as the stochastic minimum spanning tree problem (SMSTP), the quadratic assignment problem (QAP), and the unconstrained binary quadratic optimization problem (UBQP).…”