A simple enhancement of the Esau–Williams heuristic for the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem

Abstract

The Esau–Williams algorithm is one of the best known heuristics for the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem. This paper describes a simple enhancement of this heuristic. On benchmark test problems, the modified method does not result in much larger computation times and almost always produces lower solution values than does the Esau–Williams algorithm. The improvements are often significant.

Keywords:

• capacitated minimum spanning trees
• modified Esau–Williams heuristic