The Budgeted Labeled Minimum Spanning Tree Problem

In order to reduce complexity when designing multi-media communication networks, researchers often consider spanning tree problems defined on edge-labeled graphs. The earliest setting addressed in the literature aims to minimize the number of different media types, i.e., distinct labels, used in the network. Despite being extensively addressed, such a setting completely ignores edge costs. This led to the definition of more realistic versions, where budgets for the total cost, or the number of distinct labels allowed, were introduced. In this paper, we introduce and prove the NP-hardness of the Budgeted Labeled Minimum Spanning Tree problem, consisting in minimizing the cost of a spanning tree while satisfying specified budget constraints for each label type. This problem combines the challenges of cost efficiency and label diversity within a fixed budgetary framework, providing a more realistic and practical approach to network design. We provide three distinct mathematical programming formulations of the problem and design a Lagrangian approach to derive tighter lower bounds for the optimal solution of the problem. The performances of the proposed methods are assessed by conducting a series of computational experiments on a variety of randomly generated instances, which showed how the complexity of the problem increases as the size of the network, as well as the number of labels, increase and the budget restrictions are tightened.