Design of Survivable Communication Networks with High Connectivity Constraints

Abstract

Designing highly survivable interoffice telecommunication networks is considered. The problem is formulated as a minimum-cost network design problem with three node connectivity constraints. These valid and facet-defining inequalities for the convex hull of the solution are presented. A branch and cut algorithm is proposed based on the inequalities to obtain the optimal solution. With the lower bound by the cutting plane algorithm, a delete-ink heuristic is proposed to otain a good upper bound in the branch and bound procedure. The effeciveness of the branch and cut algorithm is demonstrated with computational results for a variety of problem sets : different lower bounds, two types of link costs and large number of links. The cutting plane procedure based on the three inequalities provides excellent lower bounds to the optimal solutions.