Multi-criteria p-cycle network design

The major challenge of p-cycle network design resides in finding an optimal set of p-cycles protecting the network for a given working capacity. Existing solutions (exact and heuristic approaches), for solving the problem, find the set of p-cycles protecting the network through two steps: one step for generating candidate p-cycles and a second step for selecting the efficient ones. In this paper, we present a novel heuristic approach, which computes an efficient set of p-cycles protecting the network in one step. Our heuristic approach takes into consideration two different criteria: the redundancy and the number of p-cycles involved in the solution. Simulation study shows that our approach necessitates a lower redundancy and fewer p-cycles to protect the network compared to state-of-the-art approaches.