Particle swarm optimization for the Steiner tree in graph and delay-constrained multicast routing problems

This paper presents the first investigation on applying a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to both the Steiner tree problem and the delay constrained multicast routing problem. Steiner tree problems, being the underlining models of many applications, have received significant research attention within the meta-heuristics community. The literature on the application of meta-heuristics to multicast routing problems is less extensive but includes several promising approaches. Many interesting research issues still remain to be investigated, for example, the inclusion of different constraints, such as delay bounds, when finding multicast trees with minimum cost. In this paper, we develop a novel PSO algorithm based on the jumping PSO (JPSO) algorithm recently developed by Moreno-Perez et al. (2007), and also propose two novel local search heuristics within our PSO framework. A path replacement operator has been used in particle moves to improve the positions of the particle with regard to the structure of the tree. We test the performance of our PSO algorithm, and the effect of the integrated local search heuristics by an extensive set of experiments on multicast routing benchmark problems and Steiner tree problems from the OR library. The experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed PSO algorithm over a number of other state-of-the-art approaches.