Asynchronous transfer mode: virtual path-based network design

We consider the problem of designing an ATM VP-based leased line backbone network. Given point-to-point communication demands having predefined sizes in a network, the problem is to find configurations of demand routes and link facilities installed on each edge satisfying all demands at minimum cost under some constraints. One of the most important constraints is that a single demand cannot be split over multiple link facilities. This is a sort of bin packing constraint. We propose an integer programming formulation of the problem and an algorithm to solve it. An efficient column generation technique to solve the linear programming relaxation is proposed, and a valid inequality is used to strengthen the integer programming formulation. The algorithm incorporates the column generation technique and the cutting plane approach into a branch-and-bound scheme. We test the proposed algorithm on some real problems. The results show that the algorithm can be used to solve the problems within reasonably small computing times.