A heuristic method for optimizing an intercity data transmission network

This paper deals with the problem of finding the minimum cost flow pattern for a large intercity data transmission network which provides private lines between pairs of cities and which is subject to capacity constraints. This problem can be formulated as a minimum cost multicommodity flow problem. The most efficient linear and integer programming approaches yield programs with memory requirements proportional to the square of the problem size, making impractical their use for large scale problems. In this paper a heuristic method is described which produces suboptimal solutions with smaller execution time requirements, and memory requirements linear with the problem size. Experimental results are presented comparing the proposed method with a Linear Programming approach.