Telecommunication networks frequently face technological advancements and need to upgrade their infrastructure. Adapting legacy networks to the latest technology requires synchronized technicians responsible for migrating the equipment. The goal of the network migration problem is to find an optimal plan for this process. This is a defining step in the customer acquisition of telecommunications service suppliers, and its outcome directly impacts the network owners’ purchasing behaviour. We propose the first exact method for the network migration problem, a logic-based Benders decomposition approach that benefits from a hybrid constraint programming-based column generation in its master problem and a constraint programming model in its subproblem. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of our method over instances based on six real long-haul networks and demonstrate their solution quality and the performance of the algorithm. We also show the merit of each incorporated optimization paradigm in achieving this performance.
Citation
INFORMS Journal on Computing, 2023