Diversification strategies in local search for a nonbifurcated network loading problem

This paper examines a variant of the network loading problem, a network design problem found in the telecommunications industry. In this problem, facilities of fixed capacity must be installed on the edges of an undirected network to carry the flow from a central vertex to a set of demand vertices. The objective is to minimize the total installation costs. In this work, the nonbifurcated version of the problem is considered, where the demand at any given vertex must be satisfied through a single path. The proposed heuristics alternate between a construction phase and a local search phase. Each new construction phase, except the first one, is part of a diversification strategy aimed at providing a new starting point for the following local search phase. Different diversification strategies are tested and compared on large-scale instances with up to 500 vertices.