Designing WDM Optical Networks Using Branch‐and‐Price

In this paper, we present an exact solution procedure for the design of two‐layer wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks with wavelength changers and bifurcated flows. This design problem closely resembles the traditional multicommodity flow problem, except that in the case of WDM optical networks, we are concerned with the routing of multiple commodities in two network layers. Consequently, the corresponding optimization models have to deal with two types of multicommodity variables defined for each of the network layers. The proposed procedure represents one of the first branch‐and‐price algorithms for a general WDM optical network setting with no assumptions on the number of logical links that can be established between nodes in the network. We apply our procedure in a computational study with four different network configurations. Our results show that for the three tested network configurations our branch‐and‐price algorithm provides solutions that are on average less than 5 % from optimality. We also provide a comparison of our branch‐and‐price algorithm with two simple variants of the upper bounding heuristic procedure HLDA that is commonly used for WDM optical network design.