Solution of a 200-Node p-Cycle Network Design Problem with GA-Based Pre-Selection of Candidate Structures

As a research challenge we have sought to create and solve p-cycle network design problems involving 200 or more nodes. At such problems sizes, the space of all simple cycle structures on the network graph cannot even be known in practice, let alone put into a conventional ILP problem instance. The approach being taken is a combination of GA methods with ILP; GA is guided by a subsidiary ILP surrogate problem to preselect a set of collectively high merit candidate cycles to populate a size-reduced final fully detailed ILP. Feasible solutions of high quality have been obtained for an initial 200- node test case. Comparison of the result by other workers is invited.