Robust Capacity Assignment in Telecommunications

In telecommunications, the demand is a key data that drives network planning. The demand exhibits considerable variability, due to customers movement and introduction of new services and products in the present competitive markets. To deal with this uncertainty, we consider capacity assignment problem in telecommunications in the framework of robust optimization proposed in Ben-Tal and Nemcrovski (Math Oper Res 23(4):769–805, 1998, MPS-SIAM series on optimization, 2001) and Kouvelis and Yu. We propose a decomposition scheme based on cutting plane methods. Some preliminary computational experiments indicate that the Elzinga–Moore cutting plane method (Elzinga and Moore in Math Program 8:134–145, 1975) can be a valuable choice. Since in some situations different possible uncertainty sets may exist, we propose a generalization of these models to cope at a time with a finite number of plausible uncertainty sets. A weight is associated with each uncertainty set to determine its relative importance or worth against another.