Optimizing a Ring-Based Private Line Telecommunication Network Using Tabu Search

Jiefeng Xu, Steve Y. Chiu and Fred Glover
Additional contact information
Jiefeng Xu: Delta Technology, Inc., 1001 International Boulevard, Atlanta, Georgia 30354-1801
Steve Y. Chiu: GTE Laboratories, Inc., 40 Sylvan Road, Waltham, Massachusetts 02254
Fred Glover: Graduate School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0419

Management Science, 1999, vol. 45, issue 3, 330-345

Abstract: One of the private line network design problems in the telecommunications industry is to interconnect a set of customer locations through a ring of end offices so as to minimize the total tariff cost and provide reliability. We develop a Tabu Search method for the problem that incorporates long term memory, probabilistic move selections, hierarchical move evaluation, candidate list strategies and an elite solution recovery strategy. Computational results for test data show that the Tabu Search heuristic finds optimal solutions for all test problems that can be solved exactly by a branch-and-cut algorithm, while running about three orders of magnitude faster than the exact algorithm. In addition, for larger size problems that cannot be solved exactly, the tabu search algorithm outperforms the best local search heuristic currently available. The performance gap favoring Tabu Search increases significantly for more difficult problem instances.

Keywords: digital data service; telecommunications network design; traveling salesman problem; tabu search; heuristic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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