A polyhedral study of a relaxation of the routing and spectrum allocation problem

The routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) problem arises in the context of flexible grid optical networks, and consists in routing a set of demands through a network while simultaneously assigning a bandwidth to each demand, subject to non-overlapping constraints. One of the most effective integer programming formulations for RSA is the DR-AOV formulation, presented in a previous work. In this work we explore a relaxation of this formulation with a subset of variables from the original formulation, in order to identify valid inequalities that could be useful within a cutting-plane environment for tackling RSA. We present basic properties of this relaxed formulation, we identify several families of facet-inducing inequalities, and we show that they can be separated in polynomial time

A novel integer linear programming model for routing and spectrum assignment in optical networks

International audienceThe routing and spectrum assignment problem is an NP-hard problem that receives increasing attention during the last years. Existing integer linear programming models for the problem are either very complex and suer from tractability issues or are simplied and incomplete so that they can optimize only some objective functions. The majority of models uses edge-path formulations where variables are associated with all possible routing paths so that the number of variables grows exponentially with the size of the instance. An alternative is to use edge-node formulations that allow to devise compact models where the number of variables grows only polynomially with the size of the instance. However, all known edge-node formulations are incomplete as their feasible region is a superset of all feasible solutions of the problem and can, thus, handle only some objective functions. Our contribution is to provide the rst complete edge-node formulation for the routing and spectrum assignment problem which leads to a tractable integer linear programming model. Indeed, computational results show that our complete model is competitive with incomplete models as we can solve instances of the RSA problem larger than instances known in the literature to optimality within reasonable time and w.r.t. several objective functions. We further devise some directions of future research