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I am looking for an IP model for finding a $k$-rooted minimum spanning forest on an undirected graph $G$.

Given a set of roots $R$ and a set of nodes $N$ $(R\cap N=\emptyset)$, I would find a forest of $k=|R|$ disjointed trees that span all nodes in $R \cup N$ where each $r \in R$ belongs to exactly one tree, and the sum of the edges in the trees is the minimum.

AFAIK, this is a well-known problem. However, I only found IP models for the (single) minimum spanning tree.

I tried to extrapolate a model from here, but to no avail (there are a few things I don't understand, and eventually my attempt does not avoid cycles).

I know that this is $\sf NP$-hard, but I would like to implement and test it on small instances.

Thanks

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  • $\begingroup$ Does $G$ contain any nodes outside of $R \cup N$? $\endgroup$
    – RobPratt
    Mar 27, 2021 at 22:11
  • $\begingroup$ @RobPratt no, $G$ does not contain any node outside $R \cup N$. $\endgroup$
    – Libra
    Mar 27, 2021 at 22:55

2 Answers 2

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There are flow models for the MST problem that can easily be adapted to the $k$-rooted MST. For each edge $e=(i,j)$ in the graph, create a binary variable $x_e$ (1 if the edge is used in a tree, 0 if not) and two nonnegative variables $y_{ij}, y_{ji}$ representing flows along the edge in either direction. Connect them via the constraints $y_{ij} \le n x_e$ and $y_{ji} \le n x_e$ where $n = \vert N \vert$. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of the $x_e$ variables.

Add a dummy source node to $G$ with supply $n$ and an arc with cost 0 and capacity $n$ to each node in $R$. Give each node in $N$ a demand of 1 and set up the usual flow conservation constraints. Note that there are no costs for flows, only the fixed costs for including the edges carrying the flows.

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  • $\begingroup$ I think you need additional constraints to force nodes in $R$ to appear in different trees. $\endgroup$
    – RobPratt
    Mar 27, 2021 at 22:41
  • $\begingroup$ Do I? I'm assuming that every edge has strictly positive weight. So if two nodes of $r_1, r_2 \in R$ appear in a single tree, you can drop the edge connecting $r_2$ to the tree (making $r_2$ a shrub of its own), save the cost of that edge, and still have every node in the tree receiving flow from $r_1$, right? $\endgroup$
    – prubin
    Mar 28, 2021 at 16:09
  • $\begingroup$ OK, I guess the constraints don’t enforce it but every optimal solution will satisfy it if the OP’s objective function has positive edge weights. $\endgroup$
    – RobPratt
    Mar 28, 2021 at 17:48
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I recommend extending Paul's single-commodity formulation to a multicommodity formulation with $k$ commodities. Let binary variable $z_{i,r}$ indicate whether node $i\in R \cup N$ is assigned to tree $r\in R$. The idea is to send one unit of commodity $r$ from the dummy source node $0$ to node $i$ iff $z_{i,r}=1$. The problem is to minimize $\sum_e c_e x_e$ subject to \begin{align} \sum_r z_{i,r} &= 1 &&\text{for $i\in R \cup N$} \\ z_{r,r} &= 1 &&\text{for $r\in R$} \\ y_{i,j,r} + y_{j,i,r} &\le (n+1) x_e &&\text{for $e=(i,j) \in E$ and $r\in R$} \\ \sum_j (y_{j,i,r} - y_{i,j,r}) &= z_{i,r} &&\text{for $i \in R \cup N$ and $r \in R$} \\ \sum_j y_{0,j,r} &= \sum_i z_{i,r} &&\text{for $r \in R$} \\ \end{align} You can optionally include a cut $\sum_e x_e = n$ because a spanning forest on $n+k$ nodes with $k$ trees has $n$ edges.

Like the usual formulation for the minimum-cost multicommodity network flow problem, this formulation lends itself to Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition with one block per commodity.

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