Polyhedral and computational investigations for designing communication networks with high survivability requirements

We consider the important practical and theoretical problem of designing a low-cost communications network which can survive failures of certain network components. Our initial interest in this area was motivated by the need to design certain ‘two-connected’ survivable topologies for fiber optic communication networks of interest to the regional telephone companies. In this paper, we describe some polyhedral results for network design problems with higher connectivity requirements. We also report on some preliminary computational results for a cutting plane algorithm for various real-world and random problems with high connectivity requirements, which shows promise for providing good solutions to these difficult problems.