An approach to robust network design in telecommunications

In telecommunications network design, one of the most frequent problems is to adjust the capacity on the links of the network in order to satisfy a set of requirements. In the past, these requirements were demands based on historical data and/or demographic predictions. Nowadays, because of new technology development and customer movement due to competitiveness, the demands present considerable variability. Thus, network robustness w.r.t. demand uncertainty is now regarded as a major consideration. In this work, we propose a min–max–min formulation and a methodology to cope with this uncertainty. We model the uncertainty as the convex hull of certain scenarios and show that cutting plane methods can be applied to solve the underlying problems. We will compare Kelley, Elzinga–Moore and bundle methods.