Constraint Generation for Network Reliability Problems

This paper presents a constraint generation approach to the network reliability problem of adding spare capacity at minimum cost that allows the traffic on a failed link to be rerouted to its destination. Any number of non-simultaneous link failures can be part of the requirements on the spare capacity. The key result is a necessary and sufficient condition for a multicommodity flow to exist, which is derived in the appendix. Computational results on large numbers of random networks are presented.