Allocation of Posts to a Tele-Communication Center Through Kavos (RESEARCH NOTE)

Every phone company customer in a given region receives phone services from a switching center through intermediate points called kavos. The problem addressed in this paper is where to locate this central facility and the kavos, how many of them and with what capacity, so that the total cable length is minimized. This problem can be formulated as a 0-1 mixed integer program; However, because of the scale of the problem, it is not possible to solve it in a reasonable amount of time with the existing software; Hence a solution procedure is developed which solves the problem very efficiently. In addition, to make the model more realistic, and to be able to take into account the decision maker’s preferences, an interactive program has been developed.