Incremental Network Design with Minimum Spanning Trees

Abstract: Given an edge-weighted graph $G=(V,E)$ and a set $E_0\subset E$, the incremental network design problem with minimum spanning trees asks for a sequence of edges $e'1,\ldots,e'_T\in E\setminus E_0$ minimizing $\sum{t=1}^Tw(X_t)$ where $w(X_t)$ is the weight of a minimum spanning tree $X_t$ for the subgraph $(V,E_0\cup{e'_1,\ldots,e'_t})$ and $T=\lvert E\setminus E_0\rvert$. We prove that this problem can be solved by a greedy algorithm.