Artificial immune system to find a set of k-spanning trees with low costs and distinct topologies

Abstract

This work proposes an Artificial Immune System to find a set of k spanning trees with low costs and distinct topologies. The attainment of this set of solutions is necessary when the problem has restrictions or when the interest is to present good alternative solutions for posterior decision making. Solving this problem means to explore an enormous space of solutions that grows as the number of graph nodes increases; it becomes impractible using exact or comparative methods. However, it is known that bio-inspired algorithms have a high capacity of exploration and exploitation of the search space. Moreover, inherent characteristics of AIS become the search mechanism more efficient allowing the resolution of this problem in a feasible computational time. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.