Modelling the subscriber network in rural telephone planning-A clustering algorithm

The planning of telecommunication networks is a problem of great importance, because of the large investments involved as well as due to its impact on the development of economic activities and on society as a whole. The need arises to put flexible computer decision aid tools at the disposal of decision makers and planning engineers in order to facilitate their tasks and make the most of their experience, thus turning the planning process more effective. The subproblem of determining the secondary distribution network and the subscriber lines is a fundamental step in the overall rural telephone network planning process. The solution of the subscriber aggregation subproblem constitutes the basic level of the planning process, laying the foundations for the topological and cable capacity evolution of the primary distribution network. This paper presents a method for subscriber aggregation which is based on a ‘heuristic of advantages’ which exploits the partition of subscribers into subsets, by minimizing the sum of the internal distances of all subsets.