Edge Orientation and the Design of Problem-Specific Crossover Operators for the OCST Problem

In the Euclidean optimal communication spanning tree problem, the edges in optimal trees not only have small weights but also point with high probability toward the center of the graph. These characteristics of optimal solutions can be used for the design of problem-specific evolutionary algorithms (EAs). Recombination operators of direct encodings like edge-set and NetDir can be extended such that they prefer not only edges with small distance weights but also edges that point toward the center of the graph. Experimental results show higher performance and robustness in comparison to EAs using existing crossover strategies.