Research

Paper

TESTING February 27, 2026

A Fast Heuristic for Stochastic Steiner Tree Problems

Authors

Berend Markhorst, Alessandro Zocca, Joost Berkhout, Rob van der Mei

Abstract

Network design under uncertainty arises in countless real-world settings and can be captured by the Stochastic Steiner Tree Problem (SSTP). Although there are a few approaches specifically tailored to this stochastic optimization problem, there are considerably more state-of-the-art heuristics for its deterministic variant, the Steiner Tree Problem (STP). In this work, we show how to leverage an existing STP heuristic in building a novel method for solving its stochastic variant, the SSTP. This approach is a powerful, yet simple and easy-to-implement way of solving this complex problem. We test our method using benchmark instances from the literature. Numerical results show considerably faster computation times compared to the state-of-the-art, with a gap of approximately 5%.

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2602.23858
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: math.OC
Published: 2026-02-27
Fetched: 2026-03-02 06:04

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Raw Data (Debug)
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