A.I. Techniques for Planning Telecommunication Networks

The planning of investments when building and upgrading communication networks amounts to notoriously difficult combinatorial problems. Solving these issues can not be done in a straightforward way within a reasonable calculation time, despite the ever-growing computational power of computers and the flexible off-line character of network planning. In this paper, an overview is given of the measures that can be taken to overcome these difficulties, such as introducing carefully chosen approximations in the problem formulation and the use of Artificial Intelligent techniques to come to good-quality solutions in a heuristic way. After a general overview and discussion, a practical A.I. approach will be presented, based on a philosophy of gradually increasing the level of detail. The strength of this approach will be shown for two realistic problems : the global design of a circuitswitched transport network and the assessment of the end-to-end performance in an optical packet