  The Minimum Spanning Tree Problem with Conflicts consists in finding the
minimum conflict-free spanning tree of a graph, i.e., the spanning tree of
minimum cost, including no pairs of edges that are in conflict. In this paper,
we solve this problem using a tailored Kernel Search heuristic method, which
consists in solving iteratively improved restrictions of the problem. The main
novelty of the approach consists in using an independent set of the conflict
graph within the algorithm. We test our approach on the benchmark instances and
we compare our results with the ones obtained by other heuristics available in
the literature.
