Operation research tools and methodology for the design and provisioning of survivable optical networks

While the design and the provisioning of survivable optical networks have already been studied for a long time, networks across the world are still experiencing a phenomenal growth in data traffic, leading to more complex design and provisioning problems. Network architectures are changing rapidly to meet the new end-user requirements, with many new technovirtual developments and new economical/environmental concerns such as, e.g., network virtualization, anycast routing, elastic networking, energy minimization. While operational research methods have made significant progress over the last 20 years, not much has been done in order to use the full potential of these developments in managing more efficiently communication networks, while, in other areas of applications, they have been used to solve efficiently very large/huge scale optimization problems, e.g., in the transport industry or in financial engineering or in industrial location. This paper gives an overview of some of the developments in solving some optimization problems arising in the design of optical networks or grids. In terms of optimization techniques, we will focus on decomposition techniques, and will discuss their recent success for the protection of optical networks, and of virtual networks built upon optical networks/grids.