Facets for Polyhedra Arising in the Design of Communication Networks with Low-Connectivity Constraints

This paper addresses the important practical problem of designing survivable fiber optic communication networks. This problem can be formulated as a minimum-cost network design problem with certain low-connectivity constraints. Previous work presented structural properties of optimal solutions and heuristic methods for obtaining “near-optimal” network designs. Some facet-inducing inequalities for the convex hull of the solutions to this problem are given. A companion paper describes computational results on real-world telephone network design problems with a cutting plane method based on this work. These computational results are summarized in the last section of this paper.