INFORMATICA International Journal Main Page Editorial Board Abstracting/Indexing Instructions to Authors Subscription Information Contents Author Index Papers in Production		INFORMATICA, 1999, Vol. 10, No. 4, 457-466 © Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius, 1998 ISSN 0868-4952 Simulation of Wet Film Evolution and the Euclidean Steiner Problem Vydunas SALTENIS Institute of Mathematics and Informatics Akademijos 4, 2600 Vilnius, Lithuania E-mail: saltenis@ktl.mii.lt Abstract The Steiner problem asks for the shortest network that spans a given set of fixed points in the Euclidean plane. The problem is NP hard. The result of simulation of an idealized ``wet''film connecting fixed points is a length-minimizing curve. Increasing the exterior pressure step by step we are able to achieve the film configuration near to the Steiner minimal tree. ``Dead-point''situations may occur for some symmetric allocation of fixed points. The limited simulation experiments show that the average computation time depends almost linearly on the number of fixed points for the situations without ``dead-points''. Keywords: optimization, Steiner problem, soap film, simulation, instability To preview Lithuanian abstract see full article text To preview full article text in PDF format click here You could obtain free Acrobat Reader from Adobe
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