Joint minimization of congestion and hop distance in design of optical networks

The design of a virtual topology of optical networks optimizes a performance measurement: maximum congestion, average hop distance, number of transceivers, etc. The virtual topology design (VTD) is typically obtained as solution to a mixed integer linear program (MILP) that optimizes any of the above performance measures. In this paper, we investigate a multicriteria formulation to compute the set of solutions from static VTD of the optical networks with two objective functions to: 1) minimize the maximum congestion and 2) minimize the average hop distance. The approach permits the decision maker to have a better perception of the gain and the loss of choosing any given solution. We present the method applied to obtain the set of solutions. We report some computational results which fully justify the interest of carrying out a multicriteria study.