Solving the minimum dissemination time problem in broadcasting by meta-heuristics

Abstract

This thesis considers the minimum dissemination time problem in broadcasting. Given an undirected network, we want to find the initial broadcasting node and the sequence of broadcasting which gives the smallest broadcasting time to transmit the information to the rest of nodes in the network. We give an integer programming formulation and propose tabu search and genetic algorithms to solve the problem. We test the algorithms on randomly generated data sets. Computational results show that the tabu search algorithm can find good solutions consistently.