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ACO-Steiner: Ant Colony Optimization Based Rectilinear Steiner Minimal Tree Algorithm

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Abstract

The rectilinear Steiner minimal tree (RSMT) problem is one of the fundamental problems in physical design, especially in routing, which is known to be NP-complete. This paper presents an algorithm, called ACO-Steiner, for RSMT construction based on ant colony optimization (ACO). An RSMT is constructed with ants' movements in Hanan grid, and then the constraint of Hanan grid is broken to accelerate ants' movements to improve the performance of the algorithm. This algorithm has been implemented on a Sun workstation with Unix operating system and the results have been compared with the fastest exact RSMT algorithm, GeoSteiner 3.1 and a recent heuristic using batched greedy triple construction (BGTC). Experimental results show that ACO-Steiner can get a short running time and keep the high performance. Furthermore, it is also found that the ACO-Steiner can be easily extended to be used to some other problems, such as rectilinear Steiner minimal tree avoiding obstacles, and congestion reduction in global routing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, P.R. China

    Yu Hu, Tong Jing, Zhe Feng & Xian-Long Hong

  2. Institute of Applied Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, P.R. China

    Xiao-Dong Hu & Gui-Ying Yan

  3. Electrical Engineering Deparment, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, U.S.A.

    Yu Hu

Authors
  1. Yu Hu
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  2. Tong Jing
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  3. Zhe Feng
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  4. Xian-Long Hong
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  5. Xiao-Dong Hu
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  6. Gui-Ying Yan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yu Hu.

Additional information

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 60373012, and the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (SRFDP) of China under Grant No. 20050003099.

Some preliminary results of this work were presented at IEEE International Conference on Communications, Circuits and Systems (ICCCAS), Chengdu, China, 2004.

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Hu, Y., Jing, T., Feng, Z. et al. ACO-Steiner: Ant Colony Optimization Based Rectilinear Steiner Minimal Tree Algorithm. J Comput Sci Technol 21, 147–152 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-006-0147-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-006-0147-0

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