An ant-based algorithm for finding degree-constrained minimum spanning tree

A spanning tree of a graph such that each vertex in the tree has degree at most d is called a degree-constrained spanning tree. The problem of finding the degree-constrained spanning tree of minimum cost in an edge weighted graph is well known to be NP-hard. In this paper we give an Ant-Based algorithm for finding low cost degree-constrained spanning trees. Ants are used to identify a set of candidate edges from which a degree-constrained spanning tree can be constructed. Extensive experimental results show that the algorithm performs very well against other algorithms on a set of 572 problem instances.