An Approach to Solving the Survivable Capacitated Network Design Problem

Survivability refers to keeping a system partially or fully operational when one or more of its components fail. Survivability in telecommunication networks is crucial, as failure of a network component can potentially bring down the whole communication network, as happened in some real-world cases. Adding redundant network components increases the survivability of a network, but cost of the network also increases. In this paper, we consider the design of survivable telecommunications network architecture that uses high-capacity transport facilities. The model considers selection of capacitated links and routing of multicommodity traffic flow in the network that minimizes overall network cost. Two node disjoint paths are selected for each commodity. In case of failure of the primary path, a portion of the traffic for each commodity will be rerouted through the secondary path. The methodology presented in this paper can be used by the network designer to construct cost-effective survivable networks.