Reliability Models for Multi-Objective Design Problems

Abstract

Nowadays, shared network infrastructures are being designed for supporting various services that may be subject to diverse failures and disruptions due to the malfunctioning of network component(s) or human-caused disasters. As the delivery of these services may be subject to multiple correlated failures and disruptions, the present chapter develops a reliable model for multi-objective design problems. This model finds applicability in content distribution, storage as a service, computing as a service and their possible combinations (including virtual machine service) as well as resource installation, dimensioning, and allocation for virtual networks. This chapter further elaborates on the motivation underlying the development of such a mixed-integer optimization model from the operational perspective compared to current practices. Indeed, for such problems, the objective function includes in addition to the installation and the transport/delivery cost, terms such as sizing, production, and supply costs. These optimization problems are usually modelled and solved independently though, as proposed in this chapter, it is more realistic and effective to model and solve them simultaneously because related decisions are interdependent. Next, using this generic model, we demonstrate the gain that could be achieved by resilience scheme(s) involving cooperation between the network infrastructure and the service level against conventional protection schemes upon independent and conditionally dependent service-level failure events.