Hybrid Fiber Coaxial Network Design

Raymond A. Patterson () and Erik Rolland ()
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Raymond A. Patterson: 4-30E Business Building, School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2R6
Erik Rolland: The A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California, Riverside, California 92521

Operations Research, 2002, vol. 50, issue 3, 538-551

Abstract: Much interest exists in broadband network services to deliver a variety of products to consumers, such as Internet access, telephony, interactive TV, and video on demand. Due to its cost efficiency, Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) technology is currently being considered by most Telcos and cable companies as the technology to deliver these products. The topological HFC network design problem as implemented by several major companies is a form of the capacitated tree-star network design problem. We propose a new formulation for this problem and present a heuristic based on hierarchical decomposition of the problem. The proposed solution methodology exploits an Adaptive Reasoning Technique (ART), embedded as a meta-heuristic over specialized heuristics for the subproblems. In this context, we demonstrate the dynamic use of an exact solution technique within ART. The generalizability of the proposed solution methodology is demonstrated by applying it to a second problem, the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Computational results are presented for both the HFC network design problem and the TSP, indicating high-quality solutions expending a very modest computational effort. The proposed solution method is found to be effective, and is shown to be easily adaptable to new problems without much crafting, and as such, has a broad appeal to the general operations research community.

Keywords: HFC network design: configuration of HFC topology; Tree-star: network architecture; Heuristic search: Solutions to problems in short time (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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