Solving a Ring Star Problem Generalization

The Capacitated m-Ring Star Problem (CmRSP) consists of finding a set of m rings, each of them including the central depot, a subset of customers, and a set of optional nodes used to diminish the costs of the network design. The rings must be node-disjoint (except for the central depot) in order to provide node-survivability to the network. Customers that are not part of the rings must be directly connected to nodes in the rings (as pendants). An additional constraint is that no ring (the cycle itself and pendants) can have more than Q customers. The objective is to minimize the sum of routing and connection costs. The CmRSP is NP-Hard and has important applications in the metropolitan optical fiber network planning. This work presents a metaheuristic approach to solve the CmRSP. The algorithm was tested over a set of 90 benchmark instances accomplishing in all cases optimal or near-optimal solutions.