A Hybrid Firefly-Genetic Algorithm for Planning of Optical Transport Networks

Abstract

The network design is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem that is classified as NP-Hard. The main purpose of design is often the same, to allocate and size available resources in the most possible efficient way in terms of budget, considering optimization models oriented towards minimizing costs. In this paper, it is proposed to use a hybrid optimization method called Hybrid Firefly-Genetic Algorithm to solve the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem, for Optical Transport Network (OTN) planning, considering cost minimization. The method combines the discrete firefly algorithm with the standard genetic algorithm. To apply this method, first it is proposed a mathematical formulation for the optical network planning problem. The other novelty of the proposed model is that it accomplishes the optical network design with the possibility of multiple destinations of the demand traffic matrix and with dynamic allocation of transmission systems modularity. Computational experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the hybrid Firefly-Genetic algorithm. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other metaheuristics described in the literature.