Network Design with Service Requirements: Scaling-up the Size of Solvable Problems

Network design, a cornerstone of mathematical optimization, is about defining the main characteristics of a network satisfying requirements on connectivity, capacity, and level-of-service. It finds applications in logistics and transportation, telecommunications, data sharing, energy distribution, and distributed computing. In multicommodity network design, one is required to design a network minimizing the installation cost of its arcs and the operational cost to serve a set of point-to-point connections. The definition of this prototypical problem was recently enriched by additional constraints imposing that each origin-destination of a connection is served by a single path satisfying one or more level-of-service requirements, thus defining the Network Design with Service Requirements. These constraints are crucial, for example, in telecommunications and computer networks to ensure reliable and low-latency communication. In this paper we provide a new formulation for the problem, where variables are associated with paths satisfying the end-to-end service requirements. We present a fast algorithm for enumerating all the exponentially many feasible paths, and when this is not viable, we provide a column generation scheme that is embedded into a branch-and-cut-and-price algorithm. Extensive computational experiments on a large set of instances show that our approach can move a step further in the solution of the network design with service requirements compared with the current state-of-the-art.