A new approach to generalized network design problems

The network design problems can be generalized in a natural way by considering a related problem relative to a given partition of the nodes of the graph into node sets (clusters), while he feasibility constraints are expressed in terms of the clusters. Several applications of the generalized network design problems arise in fields of telecommunications, facility and locations, transportation, energy distribution, etc. In this paper we present a new approach to the generalized network design problems based on distinguishing between global connections (connections between clusters) and local connections (connections between nodes from different clusters).