On the Two-Architecture Connected Facility Location Problem

doi:10.1016/j.endm.2013.05.113

Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics

Volume 41, 5 June 2013, Pages 359-366

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endm.2013.05.113 Get rights and content

Abstract

We introduce a new variant of the connected facility location problem that allows for modeling mixed deployment strategies (FTTC/FTTB/FTTH) in the design of local access telecommunication networks. Several mixed integer programming models and valid inequalities are presented. Computational studies on realistic instances from three towns in Germany are provided.

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Cited by (6)

Integrating LP-guided variable fixing with MIP heuristics in the robust design of hybrid wired-wireless FTTx access networks
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Citation Excerpt :
The fiber connectivity between offices and facilities of the core network is jointly modelled by the constraints (5) and (6): the constraints (5) model the flow conservation rule in root and core nodes, whereas the constraints (6) are variable upper bound constraints that link the activation of a root or core arc with the activation of the arc. An important difference of the present formulation and that proposed in Leitner et al. [45] is that we model connectivity within the core network through a multicommodity flow formulation whose size is polynomial in the size of the problem input (i.e., our formulation is compact). Conversely, the formulation of Leitner et al. [45] models connectivity by cut-set inequalities and therefore its size is potentially exponential in the size of the problem input.
This study investigates how to model and solve the problem of optimally designing FTTx telecommunications access networks integrating wired and wireless technologies, while taking into account the uncertainty of wireless signal propagation. We propose an original robust optimization model for the related robust 3-architecture Connected Facility Location problem, which includes additional variables and constraints to model wireless signal coverage represented through signal-to-interference ratios. Since the resulting robust problem can prove very challenging even for a modern state-of-the art optimization solver, we propose to solve it by an original primal heuristic that combines a probabilistic variable fixing procedure, guided by peculiar Linear Programming relaxations, with a Mixed Integer Programming heuristic, based on an exact very large neighborhood search. A numerical study carried out on a set of realistic instances show that our heuristic can find solutions of much higher quality than a state-of-the-art solver.
ILP heuristics and a new exact method for bi-objective 0/1 ILPs: Application to FTTx-network design
2016, Computers and Operations Research
Citation Excerpt :
Bi-objective FTTC-network design: In FTTC network design, multiplexors that need to be connected to a central office by fiber-optics are installed at certain locations, each potentially serving a set of customers close to it by existing copper cables. Minimizing the network construction costs and the demand of uncovered customers one obtains a bi-objective variant of ConFL (see, e.g., [27,28,35]) which is a special case of MOkAConFL for k=1 and without imposing coverage constraints. We denote this problem as BOConFL.
Heuristics and metaheuristics are inevitable ingredients of most of the general purpose ILP solvers today, because of their contribution to the significant boost of the performance of exact methods. In the field of bi/multi-objective optimization, to the best of our knowledge, it is still not very common to integrate ILP heuristics into exact solution frameworks. This paper aims to bring a stronger attention of both the exact and metaheuristic communities to still unexplored possibilities for performance improvements of exact and heuristic multi-objective optimization algorithms.
We focus on bi-objective optimization problems whose feasible solutions can be described as 0/1 integer linear programs and propose two ILP heuristics, boundary induced neighborhood search (BINS) and directional local branching. Their main idea is to combine the features and explore the neighborhoods of solutions that are relatively close in the objective space. A two-phase ILP-based heuristic framework relying on BINS and directional local branching is introduced. Moreover, a new exact method called adaptive search in objective space (ASOS) is also proposed. ASOS combines features of the ϵ-constraint method with the binary search in the objective space and uses heuristic solutions produced by BINS for guidance. Our new methods are computationally evaluated on two problems of particular relevance for the design of FTTx-networks. Comparison with other known exact methods (relying on the exploration of the objective space) is conducted on a set of realistic benchmark instances representing telecommunication access networks from Germany.
Towards optimizing the deployment of optical access networks
2014, EURO Journal on Computational Optimization
In this paper we study the cost-optimal deployment of optical access networks considering variants of the problem such as fiber to the home (FTTH), fiber to the building (FTTB), fiber to the curb (FTTC), or fiber to the neighborhood (FTTN). We identify the combinatorial structures of the most important sub-problems arising in this area and model these, e.g., as capacitated facility location, concentrator location, or Steiner tree problems. We discuss modeling alternatives as well. We finally construct a unified integer programming model that combines all sub-models and provides a global view of all these FTTx problems. We also summarize computational studies of various special cases.
A Robust Optimization Approach for Designing FTTx Networks Integrating Free Space Optics under Weather Uncertainty
2020, Q2SWinet 2020 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on QoS and Security for Wireless and Mobile Networks
Towards the integration of power-indexed formulations in multi-architecture connected facility location problems for the optimal design of hybrid fiber-wireless access networks
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An (MI)LP-based primal heuristic for 3-architecture connected facility location in urban access network design
2016, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

¹: Supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant I892-N23.

²: Supported by the APART Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

³: Supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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On the Two-Architecture Connected Facility Location Problem

Abstract

European Journal of Operational Research

Discrete Applied Mathematics