Decision support system for planning telecommunication networks: a case study applied to the Andalusian region

Network planning is essential to design real Broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks (B-ISDN). This paper presents an OR application to the design of an optic fibre network for the andalusian region. The economical appraisal is the main consideration in order to take the appropriate decisions: hub location, region sizes and selection of the urban nodes that will receive telecommunication contents. A Decision Support System with a graphic interface that allows interactive analysis of different scenarios is presented. The system contains a set of mathematical programming models and it has the capability to dynamically construct and solve instances of those models. In addition, it provides data preparation and reports. The system is an integrated, user-friendly and powerful tool to make planning studies by firms developing cable network systems in the telecommunications market

Two-level Network Design With Intermediate Facilities: An Application To Electrical Distribution Systems

We consider the two-level network design problem with intermediate facilities. This problem consists of designing a minimum cost network respecting some requirements, usually described in terms of the network topology or in terms of a desired flow of commodities between source and destination vertices. Each selected link must receive one of two types of edge facilities and the connection of different edge facilities requires a costly and capacitated vertex facility. We propose a hybrid decomposition approach which heuristically obtains tentative solutions for the vertex facilities number and location and use these solutions to limit the computational burden of a branch-and-cut algorithm. We test our method on instances of the power system secondary distribution network design problem. 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