Optimizing Network Designs for the World’s Largest Broadband Project

Peter Ferris (), Chris Forbes (), Joe Forbes (), Michael Forbes () and Paul Kennedy ()
Additional contact information
Peter Ferris: NBN Co, Sydney, New South Wales 2060, Australia
Chris Forbes: Biarri Networks, Brisbane, Queensland 4105, Australia
Joe Forbes: Biarri Networks, Melbourne, Victoria 3181, Australia
Michael Forbes: Biarri Networks, Brisbane, Queensland 4064, Australia
Paul Kennedy: Biarri Networks, Melbourne, Victoria 3181, Australia

Interfaces, 2015, vol. 45, issue 1, 83-97

Abstract: The national broadband network (NBN) is the largest public infrastructure project undertaken in Australia, and NBN Co is the government-owned company responsible for building the network. By using operations research, NBN Co expects to avoid more than $AUD1.7 billion in unnecessary construction and design costs on this $AUD36 billion project. At the beginning of this 10-year project, NBN Co divided the country into more than 3,000 fiber-serving-area modules (FSAMs), each covering approximately 2,500 premises, and will design and construct one FSAM each day. NBN Co contracted with Biarri Networks, an Australian commercial mathematics company, to optimize the design task. To accomplish this, Biarri created a fiber-optic network design (FOND) software product based on a network-flow mixed-integer programming engine. This engine minimizes the cost of materials and labor for each FSAM, subject to a variety of constraints, and provides a solution in less than five minutes. To date, more than 650 FSAM designs have been completed using FOND. This has saved NBN Co an estimated $AUD325 million in avoided construction cost, and the planning time per FSAM has decreased from 145 to 16 days.

Keywords: networks; networks: flow; Internet; government; engineering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.2014.0785 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orinte:v:45:y:2015:i:1:p:83-97

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Interfaces from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().