An (MI)LP-based Primal Heuristic for 3-Architecture Connected Facility Location in Urban Access Network Design
This addresses network design for urban telecom access, but it is incremental as it builds on existing problem formulations with specific enhancements.
The paper tackles the 3-architecture Connected Facility Location Problem in urban telecommunication access networks by proposing an optimization model with wireless signal coverage constraints and a primal heuristic combining probabilistic fixing and large neighborhood search. Computational results show the heuristic achieves much lower optimality gaps than a state-of-the-art solver.
We investigate the 3-architecture Connected Facility Location Problem arising in the design of urban telecommunication access networks. We propose an original optimization model for the problem that includes additional variables and constraints to take into account wireless signal coverage. Since the problem can prove challenging even for modern state-of-the art optimization solvers, we propose to solve it by an original primal heuristic which combines a probabilistic fixing procedure, guided by peculiar Linear Programming relaxations, with an exact MIP heuristic, based on a very large neighborhood search. Computational experiments on a set of realistic instances show that our heuristic can find solutions associated with much lower optimality gaps than a state-of-the-art solver.