Fast heuristic principle for spare capacity placement in mesh-restorable SONET/SDH transport networks

The authors propose a useful new insight into the problem of spare capacity design for mesh-restorable networks. A straightforward heuristic of average case complexity O(S) based on the new principle is within 21% (13% on average) of the minimum capacity and runs 8.5-80 times faster than the optimal integer program (IF). Application to evaluate benefits from six new span addition candidates in a 53 node, 81 span network yielded the correct rank-order of merit 650 times faster than optimal methods. This contributes to a practical assault on the problem of finding the globally best single or multiple new span additions in the evolution of large transport networks.