Stronger Lower Bounds for the Quadratic Minimum Spanning Tree Problem with Adjacency Costs

We address a particular case of the quadratic minimum spanning tree problem in which interaction costs only apply for adjacent edges. Motivated by the fact that Gilmore-Lawler procedures in the literature underestimate the contribution of interaction costs to compute lower bounds, we introduce a reformulation that allows stronger linear programming bounds to be computed. An algorithm based on dynamic column and row generation is presented for evaluating these bounds. Our computational experiments indicate that the reformulation introduced here is indeed much stronger than those in the literature.