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arXiv · 2602.23858

A Fast Heuristic for Stochastic Steiner Tree Problems

Berend Markhorst·Alessandro Zocca·Joost Berkhout·Rob van der Mei
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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%.

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Berend Markhorst, Alessandro Zocca, Joost Berkhout, Rob van der Mei. 2026-02-27. A Fast Heuristic for Stochastic Steiner Tree Problems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23858

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