Interworking of planning and operation for reliable and cost-effective transport networks

In this paper the authors demonstrated how a routing tool can improve the operation of a complex transport network. The tool's two main objectives are to improve the interaction of network planning and operation and to improve the reliability of provisioned circuits. The calculation of routings for customer demands is the main link between network planning and operation. A central routing tool can be implemented to optimize the interworking of planning and operation for an efficient use of network resources, high reliability and fast provisioning times of customer demands. Network labeling was introduced to document the network structure and a routing algorithm that incorporates this structure as well as the physical disjointness of 1 + 1 protected demands. The details are exemplified for a SDH network but the methods themselves can be applied to other kinds of transport networks as well.