Issue RAIRO Oper. Res. Volume 41, Number 4, October-December 2007 Page(s) 411 - 426 DOI 10.1051/ro:2007033 Published online 11 October 2007

RAIRO Oper. Res. 41 (2007) 411-426
DOI: 10.1051/ro:2007033

An approach to robust network design in telecommunications

Georgios Petrou¹, Claude Lemaréchal² and Adam Ouorou<sup>1

1</sup>  France Télécom Division R&D, MCN-OTT, 38-40 rue du Général Leclerc, 92794 Issy-Les-Moulineaux Cedex 9, France; georgios.petrou@orange-ftgroup.com, adam.ouorou@orange-ftgroup.com
²  Inria, 655 avenue de l'Europe, Montbonnot, 38334 Saint Ismier, France; Claude.Lemarechal@inrialpes.fr

(Received February 9, 2006. Accepted February 26, 2007. Published online 11 October 2007.)

Abstract
In telecommunications network design, one of the most frequent problems is to adjust the capacity on the links of the network in order to satisfy a set of requirements. In the past, these requirements were demands based on historical data and/or demographic predictions. Nowadays, because of new technology development and customer movement due to competitiveness, the demands present considerable variability. Thus, network robustness w.r.t demand uncertainty is now regarded as a major consideration. In this work, we propose a min-max-min formulation and a methodology to cope with this uncertainty. We model the uncertainty as the convex hull of certain scenarios and show that cutting plane methods can be applied to solve the underlying problems. We will compare Kelley, Elzinga-Moore and bundle methods.

Mathematics Subject Classification. 65K05, 90C26, 90B12

Key words: Telecommunications network design, robust optimization, min-max-min problems, cutting plane methods


© EDP Sciences, ROADEF, SMAI 2007

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